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.