No Country for Old Anybody

I don't like predictions because predictions affect expectations and expectations affect outcomes. Judging from that you might think that I believe in positive thinking and creative visualization and such but I don't, though I prefer anything to pessimism. I'm trying to figure out what I do believe in and it's probably incremental change, with feedback, in the direction of good outcomes.

What an appealing title. And it makes a nice, knotty acronym if you want to try it. There are always assumptions, sometimes hidden, underlying everything, which is where the trouble usually starts. The assumption of rational markets is a notorious failure. And the assumption of rational actors within markets. And the self-correcting thing. What next? That people prefer pain to pleasure? 

Maybe. You have to wonder when you witness the American people voting themselves a heap of hurt, even when the hurt is almost immediate and the causal mechanisms are clear. When the recipients of social services vote against those services, for example, probably from an instinct for comparative disadvantage, meaning that other people they don't like will be hurt more. 

If this sounds sick to you I won't argue the point. Then consider longer term examples with less clear causal mechanisms, such as the case of the care and feeding of aging baby-boomers. I think we're heading for a crash on this one, unnecessarily. The good intent isn't even there. In fact there are people in power who seem to want to deprive the boomers of their security.

When it could be easily ensured through incremental means starting now, but there isn't the collective will. It makes me want to move to Scandinavia. They must have internet dating sites there, maybe I can marry a Swede and get citizenship. Shit, I better lose some weight, if I want to marry a sexy Scandinavian, but I'm motivated, by this, my new retirement plan. Good-bye, cruel, American world!

Better Living Through Misery

I wish I could say there is a single, core difference between progressives and conservatives, an attitude toward authority, for example, or the ability to deal with change and uncertainty, but I can't. Every time I come up with something I find holes in it.

But this in itself is instructive. Monocausal is not my style, and I'm proudly progressive. Conservatives seem to love it. Simplicity, I mean, and monocausal explanations for everything. Maybe it's due to a belief in determinism and innate qualities.

Inborn attributes, and nature over nurture, but there I go again, slipping into a simple outlook, though we can see that this does capture something fundamental to conservatives, that people belong in certain classes or clans and should stay put.

All the goodness going to the few, those born worthy, that is, and the misery to the many. Someone can change camps, but this is so associated in conservative minds with the drama of a conversion experience as to only be possible in that way.

So it is comforting to them to think that the piling on of all the goodness to the elect, and the misery to the non-elect, is not only natural but God's will, because suffering, misery and deprivation are means through which you might be transformed. 

And accept Jesus as your Lord and Savior, so, when conservatives add to the world's suffering in denial of and revolt against their ability to alleviate it, they are on God's side and looking out for us, in the remote hope of our salvation through suffering.

This seems unchristian to me and presumptuous, but they evidently like to see people suffer, from a belief in just deserts or in the efficacy of suffering in self-improvement. Conservatives are strange people. I can conceive of the validity of their beliefs. 

If humans are, in fact, nothing more than animals, but the beliefs are irreconcilable with Christianity and our national ideals, so I wish they would give up on the ruse--fat chance--in which case their victims might more easily see the truth and fight back.

The truth being that they have no ideals at all, but are only intent on grabbing all the power they can, while hoping their victims never figure out how they're being messed with, which is exactly what they fear, the end of their one-sided battle for domination.

Apologizing for America

It's easy to put this trite accusation to rest. We're not apologizing for America, we're apologizing for a rogue version of it invented by Republicans. The entire world is now on edge trying to figure out where, in the monstrous mutation of our country we now inhabit, are our ideals. 

Which is to say those principles on which we were founded and which, as they abandon them, Republicans scream about all the more loudly. No one has ever expected us to be perfect, let alone the beacon that certain right-wing blowhards proclaim us to be, but only to keep the faith.

The faith in freedom and individualism and respect for the rights of others, and at the keeping of that faith we have failed. We lay the failure at the feet of Republicans. Why? Every rational outsider I've spoken with has said the same thing, that a certain presidential election was key.

When we reelected the most criminally incompetent and morally defective leader in the history of the country. That's when the world gave up on us or at least began to wonder and worry, what the hell is happening over there, meaning here, in the land where we are no longer created equal.

We are created privileged and predestined, in keeping with the beliefs of the ruling coalition of bluebloods and rednecks, both of which factions were somehow embodied in the winner of that election, who went on to show the world the extent to which we think we are above the law.

It makes sense that we would be defensive and self righteous in proportion to our failure, and unwilling to assume any responsibility to a degree commensurate with the crimes, which are ongoing, the legacy of those horrible years of Republican hegemony, for which I again apologize. 

The Luxury Tax

What we now see in North Carolina as part of the Great Regression, the new social movement of the resurgent right, is an increased reliance on sales and use taxation in generating revenue.

Meaning that poor and middle class people will pay a higher rate than ever, food and clothing and shelter being luxuries for them. Similarly second homes and pleasure craft are now necessities.

And are subsidized for those who can ill-afford them, this being the appropriate venue for affirmative action, since the well-off have already demonstrated their innate worth and should be rewarded.

Big boats are durable goods by definition. Food turns to shit within a day. And we've all seen what poor people do to neighborhoods. They've been creating affordable housing forever just by relocating.

The equity bottoming out at zero, or nearly, which goes to show that poor people destroy value. This is why they are poor, so any attempt to help them is money up in smoke or down the drain.

Burned in crack pipes or flushed down the toilet when the police raid their drug dens, that is, and wasted in other imaginative and debased ways. It's about character, when you get down to it.

Compare someone like Franklin Roosevelt to George Bush or Tom DeLay and it all becomes clear. Ask yourselves, then, what kind of people you really want running our state and the country.

People with brains and compassion or thugs and morally-defective good-for-nothings.

A New Measure

I want to propose new measure and standard of genocidal destructiveness. Let's call it a COULTER, in honor of Ann, defined as the deaths of ten thousand amalgamated individuals, meaning a hypothetical mish-mash of people of every known tribe and tradition.

This unit is unavoidably indeterminate, but we've got to start somewhere, and a HOLOCAUST, another possible measure, is just too big. People can't relate to it. And the targeted persons were all of one tribe, so if messes with the valuation of the currency.

Whether or not someone identifies with the tribe being decimated, I mean to say, would have an effect, so thank God we have Ann, since she's so unabashedly ethnocentric and shouldn't object to the honor, genocide being the ultimate expression of tribal militancy.

And Ann has long ago owned her ethnic chauvinism. That gauntlet has been thrown down with emphasis. Starting with the invasion of Iraq we can see immediately that it's too one-sided to be called a war and may qualify as genocide. It can be assigned a COULTER score.

Let's say of ten, for the sake of argument. I have no idea if it makes any sense or is accurate. None, whatsoever, at all. It's not the point. The point is that by assigning a number you are forced to make an evaluation, to pay attention and, one hopes, to care. That is the goal.

It's what Ann and her followers refuse to do. To look, evaluate, and care, so we have made good use of her in the end. The karmic balance of the universe may not have been restored, as it never probably will be, but a step has been taken in that direction. Thank you, Ann.

For once your name has been well used.

They Started It

There's an important principle in the world of human affairs often overlooked off of the schoolyard because of its aboriginal simplicity: who started it?

A Very Convenient Jesus

It's one of the most confounding things I've ever encountered, when I recognized that intelligence could be mechanically associated with some very bad stuff, which is to say fear, because primally fearful people can exhibit overdeveloped intellectual abilities in response to the fear. They have incredibly inquiring minds because they never assume that what is on the surface is reality.

In fact they assume it is not, so they dig deeper in search of the truth, usually coming to rest in a place which justifies the fear, that being the only real thing for them. This is hard to detect, because the stuff piled higher and deeper on top of the fear is very nearly impenetrable and, like most everyone I know, I admire intelligence, a reasonable prejudice in so far as that is possible. 

The other impediment is that the fear is usually unrecognized in proportion to its severity. The more fearful people are the more likely they are to be unaware of it, that is. If it's wholly beneath the threshold of awareness their lives are unconsciously consumed by the fabrication of threats, since the fear is easier to tolerate when it has a focus. Paranoia strikes deep.

Into your lives it will creep. The edifice of rationalization on top of the fear is usually internally consistent and highly evolved, the weak point being the false premise of the fear. The edifice is also defended to the death because primally fearful people are irrationally and erroneously operating on the assumption of impending annihilation. Normally they themselves go on the attack.

Thinking that they are under attack, of course, which they aren't initially, but then they are in response to their own aggression. It's dizzying to think about it. I better admit it, against my will, but I got started on all of this when I googled something innocuous and Ann Coulter popped up in the results, first in line. And then there was Ted Cruz in the news. Evidently he's brilliant. 

How do you explain these people? It's as though they're in a psychological submarine, trolling in the murky waters of the unconscious, a submarine which can never surface because of fear. There's an autistic aspect as well to this in the enormous element of isolation in their ideation. They are also usually incapable of empathy and don't appear outwardly fearful.

Try to make a Disney movie out of this. It's the antithesis of innocence, and yet they're probably not responsible because of the delusion. They're mentally ill, but I say that knowing that there's a catch underlying the insanity defense. If you have to be crazy to kill someone then no one can be held responsible for killing anyone. I prefer to decide first on the crime and who did it.

And then on broader culpability. The crimes of the Coulter crowd are approaching another threshold of comprehension. Like a light-year, you can't get your head around the damage they've done. All of South and Central America, destroyed by us. The Middle East, wrecked by us. The world economy, on the ropes because of us. The natural environment, reeling from us.

Is it any wonder Ann and Ted won't open the door an inch on admitting any fault in relation to anything? The weight behind that door is immense. It also means that their religious convictions, out of which they make so much, are a sham, just another mechanism of defense against the imaginary threats. The self righteousness and obliviousness have real utility.

Their Jesus doesn't care about Muslim lives, food for children, care for the elderly, hope for the poor, or anything other than their own aggrandizement and increasing wealth and power. What they have there is a very convenient Jesus, but they can't honestly believe in the existence of God at all. If they did then they would really have something to fear, judgment day.

Cui Bono

There's so much uncertainty in the world, it's good to return to simple, proven rules whenever possible in finding one's way through things, one of which is: who's making out here? Not smooching, obviously, though there's that angle as well, but getting rich and benefiting in other ways.

I think I remember once, in reading the Church Fathers for a class--it was another life--running into some axioms for judging true and false prophets or preachers. Two indications of unrighteousness: they steal your money or sleep with your wives--reasonable sounding criteria.

If a little sexist. Luckily there's an easy answer to this, the issue of self interest, in our situation. With the advent of Reaganomics we were repeatedly reassured that the Republicans weren't intending to institute the greatest upwards redistribution of wealth in the history of the world.

Well, they have accomplished that anyway, and damn efficiently, one must say. What's truly remarkable is that they can deny it at all--that it has happened or that they caused it. It has happened and they caused it. J'accuse. They've convicted themselves through their defensiveness.

Why would they bother if they weren't guilty? I will vote for any Democratic presidential candidate who will insist on enforcing this charge. And I here propose a new marginal tax rate on the rich, 110%, branded "confiscatory plus," to help right the wrongs. They've had their party. It's time to pay the bills.

Beans and Rice

The great leap backward is being fully implemented in North Carolina, with pools and schools, as always, the first items of concern for the privileged white people of the South. These were the most urgent issues after desegregation, for visceral reasons.

Pools were never a problem. You close the public ones and send your kids to private ones. Similarly the push for privatization everywhere now is not about efficiency but exclusion. Schools weren't as easy to get in hand but the necessary forces are now in place.

It's turn-back-the-clock time for the schools and it will simply have to play out. Nothing can be done to stop it, and I have other things on my mind following the violence in France. The terror is something we have to begin to take seriously and to really comprehend.

We should be preventive and not only reactive and responsive in relation to terrorism, and understand it deeply and at the molecular and atomic levels, initially with some soul searching and the owning of our own inner terrorist, whatever that may entail.

The problem is that it feels good to be part of a group with a mission, and to believe that you are unequivocally right and that you are justified by God and will be redeemed and sit at the right hand and all that shit. It has to be an incredibly powerful experience.

To get people to blow themselves up, I mean. And to overcome the misgivings that must be there because they are, in fact, wrong in their understanding of their own religious precepts, as we are rightly reassured by respected and informed authorities.

Are we really so far removed from this ourselves, I wonder. The Klan was a terrorist organization. I think that is beyond arguing, which means that a third of the US was ruled by a group in no way functionally different from the Taliban, as late as the 1960's.

And of course before that the slave states were in even worse shape, though the terror was institutionalized and so there was no need for the underground, guerrilla aspect of the thing. So to this day there are memorials all over the South honoring terrorists.

What a thought, but it's indisputably true that defending the South meant defending slavery and therefore the terrorism which sustained slavery and segregation. Man, that's sobering, because it's so close to home and recent and so much a part of our history.

It does mean that all those Confederate memorials should be destroyed and that the South should finally own its shit, if we are to have a consistent and credible stance in opposition to terror. We could use the Stone Mountain memorial for bombing practice.

If we don't how can we really condemn the people who practice terrorism. They have a thing for schools, too, I remember now, and are all about remaking education in their own countries so that it's in line with their religion and the will of God, as they see it.

Just like the guys in charge in North Carolina. Damn, it's so discouraging to think that, but my friends who encouraged me to write told me this would happen, that writing things down would force you to think things through and sometimes take you to unforeseen places.

It's time--I decree it--to decompress from this unpleasantness with a beer and some savory Southern food, spicy beans and rice. May we all eat well tonight, it's my wish for you, and survive this insanity our country is going through, with the help of God.

I Am Waiting

I keep thinking that the defenders of torture, those patriots, lovers of Jesus and self-appointed guardians of truth and the Constitution, will one day raise the question of the morality and rightness of the practice, and not only argue for its effectiveness.

I'm still waiting.

A Loaf and a Fish, If We're Lucky

I have decided to brand the Obama crowd THE ACHIEVERS. Until they get a clue and ask for my help in making all those important decisions I'll have to work on impressions gleaned from the best available sources, which are crap, the fourth estate having been crushed into pulp by the business interests.

The information available to us is just terrible, but I think the people shaping the policies are, like Obama himself, smart kids whose identities are entirely invested in success within a certain context, which is to say that it's all about them. It's not about us or the country or the world or the planet or rightness.

Look at the cult of efficiency, a good example. The US produces food with incredible efficiency, when viewed myopically, and then throws 40% of it away and people are hungry at the same time. Where I come from this is called crazy. In Washington it evidently passes for success or is at least acceptable.

Obama and his team put points on the board in such a way that it looks good on paper. The end for them is a great report card, graduating with distinction and from an ivy league school, of course. It makes them feel good about themselves. Meanwhile our country is being destroyed and utterly stripped of hope.

For people who need it, anyway. It's probably unfair to say they don't care but you have to hold people responsible even if they're only enablers in the franchise of doom. I'm sick now so I have to go. Every time I get sick, though, I'm reminded of how vulnerable I feel about aging in America.

In the land of plenty of insecurity, I suppose I mean, and I'm in way better shape than most people in my health and finances, but who wants to worry at all. There's no reason whatsoever for people in a country as wealthy as ours to have to worry much. It's a failure, with a big grade of "F," for the policy people.

And it's an inversion of the miracle of the loaves and fishes, reducing plenty to poverty. They manage to depersonalize this as though it goes no further than a graph or spread sheet or some power-point bullshit, but we're talking about hunger and food here. Oh, Bobby Kennedy, may you appear to them.

Plague them in their dreams. May they see the disgrace of hunger and hopelessness in the new America, our sharecropper society, and not get shot before they can fix it.

Overcooked

I apply the principle of "al dente" all over the place. It works for me. Rules are good but they only get you so far. It's best to stay engaged with the processes and be willing to make decisions on the basis of incoming information.

Immediately the idea that more is better falls apart when you use the tooth. One of my ongoing gripes is that aging white people finish their lives in their biggest houses ever, after the kids are gone but before the retirement villa.

As though it's some kind of flourish or crescendo in relation to their existence, that is, when it's really just dumb and wasteful and doesn't make their lives better in any healthy way. And look at the mess our government is in.

It's overcooked into indescribable nothingness, burned beyond recognizing or reduced to an undifferentiated mass. I want to apply the tooth--not me personally, but you know what I mean--to bite on Boehner and McConnell a bit.

Or we could throw them against the wall and see if they stick. I'm sure we'll decide to turn down the flame on the money pouring into the capitol from private sources. Fucking jet fuel, that's what the stuff is. It's way too volatile.

You can see it in the restlessness of the new majorities. They're boiling over. So let's just turn down the flames, people. Are you with me?

Leftovers: The Brokers' Banquet

I just woke up early from a vivid dream, which I conclude, unbiasedly, is representative of the new reality of our society, the broker's paradise. In it the working people--I am one--are allowed at the end of a banquet to have a go at the leftovers, which are enough to feed an army of adolescent boys, but there are no plates or utensils. 

Wait, I've found a few paper or plastic ones the size of a small saucer. I grab them and walk around the buffet struck stupid by the amount of amazing food remaining. I'm so stunned I don't feel hungry anymore or even resentful, just frustrated and disgusted at the waste of the capital partners, who have so much more than they can consume. 

But they would rather see the leftovers thrown away than used because that's the way they are, greed incarnated, which--an interesting word--points to the brokers' own eventual end, to be consumed by death, as with us all. They must be in denial of that but it doesn't matter because my reservoir of feeling is entirely taken up by sadness at their insanity.

They are nothing more than animals, sophisticated meat, without an aspiration to be better because they have been so well rewarded for their predatory drives. What else can be said, but behold them with wonder, and from a safe distance, though there are crates for such creatures and we would be well advised to use them.

Begging the Question

As I understand it this phrase is misused all the time. It means something along the lines of assuming information not in evidence, stuff not proved. It's a logical fallacy, "petitio principi" in Latin, discovered by people who cared about logic and reason and argumentation and the truth. Neurotics, that is.

Too much of our internal energy has been allocated to the intestines for digestion, it would seem, and there isn't enough left to tackle the truth and other such naggingly abstract topics, and what does it matter anyway. The whole point of our existence as a species was to master the world and we have pretty much done that.

So it's time to relax and kick back and enjoy the fruits of our good fortune. But, you know, I'm neurotic and I can't let it go, that anachronistic concern for reason and reality, due to a faulty upbringing, no doubt, so I wonder what the elephant is in the bathroom taking a shit. The elephant, the false premise, has got to be fear. 

We assume there's something we need to be afraid of and that, even if there is, it's somehow productive to live in a chronic state of fear rather than dealing with the scary things above-board and rationally. So we argue about how to deal with the threats on the assumption that there are threats but there are not threats in evidence.

Prove to me that there are. How many times over do you have to be able to destroy the world before you feel safe or what the fuck good does it do you, having enough nukes to annihilate the entire solar system, or at least all of the planets. We might as well get rid of the whole arsenal, an interesting idea. We could bury it in Alaska.

We could then try to live in peace with our fellow humans or even bribe them into submission and still come out ahead. It turns out, though, according to my sources, that the rest of the world is pretty fed up with us. And scared, since it seems that we think it's our right to attack anyone we want whenever we want.

Interesting, to think that we are the thing to be afraid of, even the thing for us to be afraid of, and that we should be afraid of ourselves. I'm heading off now to try to neurotically get a handle on that and consider that it might be a mechanism or in some way true, that the fearers are to be feared. You can be my bot.

Help me grind it out by processing all the info, that is, be a bot for truth. Better than bots for fear, I think, or bots for war, though I believe that bot-hood generally is not the way to go. People can and should do better. It would help if we could get past the fear. Let's work on that. Oh, no, I just remembered the elephant.

The plumbing, now there's something to worry about.