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.

One Oath is Enough

Something's wrong when nearly all of the elected representatives of the Republican party take a second oath in Washington. And that party is always in power because they insist on having their way even when they lose and that second oath is way more enforceable than the other, the oath of office.

This is about Grover Norquist, the anti-tax man. Grover should have been run out of Washington in shame after the Abramoff scandal, a telling glimpse of what these guys actually stand for. We didn't need another glimpse but there it is, the white boys stealing and engaging in insulting, racist small talk.

It is fundamental. Grover's organization is anti-democratic to a revolutionary extent. If we can't stop such an open and blatant challenge to the essential, fair functioning of our government we are done-for and deserve to be. I won't begrudge Grover his private-jet forays to Burning Man.

He can keep all that but he must go.

Cut It Out

Let's be clear, when you hear the word "cut" coming from the Republican side, substitute the word "kill." Cutting is killing. When they move money from people who need it to people who don't people die. When they squander money like bandits in places like Iraq people die. 

While they insist that the war on drugs continue people die. People die while they piss away America's prosperity living like pigs. People die while they shop and play golf and manage their investments and live smug lives. Republicans kill people. This is their idea of normal.

In My Opinion...

Racism is anything other than judging people by standards of behavior.

Original sin is taking things for granted, especially the gift of your life.

Logo-land

I had one of those dreams in which all the ugliness of the world was gone, both the physical ugliness and interpersonal strife. It wasn't wimpy, just not ugly. All the buildings were painted-brick with big windows and they were fresh but not quite gleaming.

It was a multifarious world, full of surprises and small businesses, everything unique but clearly part of a system, with shops and manufacturing and farms and interesting venues of every sort, entirely organic and obviously the product of an evolutionary process.

Even the instances of weirdness and dysfunction and mildly dangerous or threatening places made sense. It all fit and had a role, of a sort. I guess it was a complete melding of a child's view, with the validity of things assumed as presented, and an adult view. 

I was an adult in the dream, kind of, and looking at everything non-judgmentally but not without suspicion, trustingly but not naively. The most remarkable aspect was how everything simply belonged and had a place, as in a biological system. 

People were living as a species in a way that made sense in the world, though at the top in terms of power, and interpersonally like an ecosystem as well, hierarchically, but smoothly and without striving or obsession, and there was only walking and trains.

What was strikingly missing were corporate, consolidated entities. There were bigger things but always still at a human scale. You never turned a corner and saw a mall or a Walmart. The political or social system was transparent, allowing people to do what they do. 

To work and to live. The dream left me with an intense yearning, I'm not sure for what, but I think for immersion and belonging, to be part of a world within which everyone is free and independent and secure, and where there is proportion, logos.

They say somewhere that it was there in the beginning.

Howling Mad

All you can hope for, watching the parade of lunatics now running for president from the Republican side, is that there is an undiscovered mechanism wherein, at the highest level of insanity and perversity, an organism becomes too at-odds with itself to function and raptures or is transmogrified or morphs into another state of being in order to preserve itself, an elemental trick of survival. 

Take Ted Cruz. In order to be as consistently wrong as Cruz is there has to be an understanding, somewhere within him, of what is right but it must be unconscious or repressed. He must be possessed. Aha, there must be a demon in him, or gremlin, which explains the strange, destructive output of the Cruz-entity and the inconsistency of his opinions with everything he purports to be.

He says he is a Christian and a loyal citizen and patriot, a lover of America, and a crusader for what is right and true and, yet, there is no evidence of a conscience at a child's level, that of connecting the dots, simple cause and effect. Cruz/demon must be required to defend itself: the wars and killing, ethno-chauvinism, intolerance in every form, heartlessness in the face of human need, etc.

Perhaps this will act as an exorcism and the demon will flee, leaving an identifiable human form, maybe alive and with a normal, functioning conscience, capable of living with other people in the absence of predator drones, persecution and extreme judging. It is an interesting, indeterminate situation. Demons are notoriously cunning and tough so the Cruz carcass, the bodily vessel, may not survive.

But the soul we assume to be there somewhere, however beaten-down and demoralized, will either be able to function within the body known as "Cruz" or be free, a better outcome anyway for both Cruz, the man assumed to exist, independently of the demon, and society. Keep a crucifix with you in case you encounter him. And maybe some garlic. Be prepared. He's a piece of work.