The American Way

You can feel it coming. Maybe you can see it now. These huge corporations--Google, Facebook, Amazon and the like--are going to start shoving stuff down our throats.

Once they are unassailable, or think they are, they will begin to take pieces out of us every minute. They aren't risk-takers. They are averse to risk. They want to print money. 

It's the American Way.

Don't Do the Math

I am an acolyte. I'm a follower. When I was 16 or so, a callow dude, I discovered E. F. Schumacher. Small is Beautiful, a quietly humane manifesto, made sense to me.

After six or so educationally catastrophic years I studied Classics and Economics in college, then on to graduate school in Econ. It was all about math and "efficiency."

What the fuck is efficiency? It's something economists could claim made their field less of a soft science, is all. They wanted more mojo, a bigger academic dick.

I switched back to the study of Classics. There was an amorphous standard there, rigorously applied: honesty. They wanted to be scholarly. They aspired to be Einsteins.

They aspired to be Einsteins of the humanities, to have a clear and inclusive vision, to encounter everything on its own terms and without prejudice. It was humane.

It made it impossible to take people out of the equation, to turn them into objects and abstractions and have them fall through the cracks, to deprive them of their humanity.

This is Schumacher. He applied this moral imperative to Economics. Okay, the math is okay, but the context is everything. Without a humane context the math is meaningless.

Outed, and at the End of a Rope

I have to out myself. I may want D. T. for president. I may want him instead of H. R. C. Give me B. S. but he doesn't have a chance. I want B. S. with 'roid rage.

D. T., as president, might do anything, even some good. He does what he wants. When has he not? We know the R.'s will wreck-on and the D.'s do nothing.

So, instead of predictable crap, why not a case of the D. T.'s?

Hate-a-thon

The Evangelical love of hatred came through to me again reading an article about Ted Cruz and the "will to power," which someone said had replaced persuasion as the evangelicals' means.

They are simply determined to have their way and so now democracy takes a fall and freedom falters. It's like ISIS and the Taliban, religious extremists intent on running everything no matter what.

Life, the mess we're stuck in, is despised. Life is contemptible in relation to the afterlife and God's perfection. That's their standard. Evangelicals reject the doctrine of the incarnation, the love of creation. 

Hate is their inspiration and their motivation. They choose death and destruction and they reject God in rejecting God's creation. They want annihilation and despise the physical world for its imperfection.

Unresponsive

For non-rich Americans their experience in life is more often of pushing buttons and having nothing happen, buttons on things they are supposed to own.

The government is unresponsive. The workplace is unresponsive. Educational systems are unresponsive. Their healthcare is increasingly unresponsive.

Again, we say, thank you, Republican assholes.

Alternazon

We need an alternative to Amazon without the evil and world-domination. And Facebook. And, now, Google. We need Costcos to their Walmarts, better options.

And that's to say nothing of our government, where we also need an un-evil option with an anti-domination stipulation. Does big have to be evil, I wonder?

The Face of Republicanism

I can't do it here, but I envision a "Hall of Hate-Fame" or "Greatest Shits" or some biographical compendium of the people who have destroyed America. 

There would be categories and honors and lists of notable achievements, including bankruptings, killings, squandered inheritances and personal gain-for-pain.

The inheritances are not all tangible. The pain is always someone else's. The efficiency of the destruction is the most important criterion. It was a big boat to sink.

"College Republicans" is my favorite category. Never have so many owed so much to so few, but in a bad way: Lee Atwater, Karl Rove, Grover Norquist and Jack Abramoff.

Phil and Wendy Gramm have their own "lifetime of failure" nook, where the stunning persistence of obviously failed economic doctrines is detailed. What an accomplishment!

Fox News funds a museum. There, the face of Republicanism is Roger Ailes--fat, pasty-white, rich and hideous to behold--and not the hench-persons he has out front.

Cheap Shot, Inc.

Of all the loathsome characters on the right James O'Keefe is special. He's a professional asshole, an incredible prick and Joe McCarthy in knee pants. He makes you wish that the God he claims to serve would come down and judge him.

Guilty! 

The Cold War Turned Inwards

I have a new friend and I've been trying to understand her. It was so easy as kids, to understand your friends, I suppose because we all wore our characters like clothes. 

It was right there to see. It sure isn't later on. There's layers and evolution and the changing of someone's personality in relation to circumstances and experiences. 

And there's concealment, depth and the reserve that comes with time. Growing up as I did, with kids whose parents grew up with my parents, the context helped. 

There is still a little leap of faith needed, more so as you get older. What I mean is that, as adults, you have to let go of the desire to contain people and to resort to simple characterizations. You have to just believe in them at some point and hope for the best.

It's not only presumptuous to try to comprehend someone but it's impossible. If you don't let that desire go you get distortion, as with the Republicans.

Their need for security and certainty means they make stuff up. They fill the gaps with a leap of non-faith. They default to suspicion, as they did with the commies. 

And now the suspicion is turned on us. They don't think that Democrats are really Americans. They think we're the enemy. They want us gone.

What's Your Shtick?

My brain works on analogy. It's my own uncertainty principle in operation. I understand things, to the extent that I do, through semblence and through stories. 

I kind of think that life is a shtick, that real authenticity is always below the surface, and that it isn't just that the invented part matters but that invention is all there is.

All-Air Band

Air drums. I play air drums. Pretty damn well, if I do say so. I'm looking for mates for my all-air band.

Check It at the Door

Enjoy the Republican debates. And check your conscience at the door.

I Want You To Want It So Badly You Don't Care About Anything Else

There's a story there. I'll tell it to you sometime.

Any Inhuman Heart

I know someone who was in a position to rub elbows with Dick Cheney before he ran the world. They once argued about some issue at an otherwise abandoned table after a dinner in Georgetown. Cheney had the consistency that comes from mania, there on display. 

Reality would be brought to heel, in Cheney's hands, and made to conform to his disposition and predisposition. For a militarist like Cheney there was something missing, though, the reality-check of facing the consequences of your actions and opinions, life in the field. 

It isn't fair. In the latter World War projectiles like Patton, MacArthur and LeMay found their places at a level lower than strategy, though their insane fantasies were later publicly known. Thank God there were people who understood enough to rein them in and use them.

With Cheney it wasn't so. There can still be a reckoning on his catastrophic effects and, not just to pick on Dick, there are others like him waiting in line, politicians, policy and financial people. Crazies have their place. It's essential to see that they stay there.

Vic(ar)ious(ness)

What means Donald Trump? What means the meanness?

Again, I say, I don't like discontinuities. Nothing comes from nothing. How is it that the most fortunate people ever, we Americans, can be seduced by meanness? How can we be so resentful?

Our lives feel inauthentic and unrooted, no doubt, and that is the undercurrent expressing itself through attachment to oversize embodiments of the fear created by the feelings of vulnerability.

The vulnerability is imaginary, a hallucination. It's the result of a lack of self-knowledge, the fear of ourselves, so we're out there seeking ourselves in all the wrong places, through identification with iconic characters.

Donald Trump, for example, represents our worst suspicions about our subliminal selves and our inadequacy. Through him we vicariously live out our anger, fear and resentment. We are trying to encounter ourselves.

And we do. It's pathetic and unseemly, a country-club culture trying to redefine privilege as a right, betraying the legacy of the relatively responsible people who preceded us and who knew about work and adversity.

Shitcatchers

Did you see the movie Songcatcher, with Janet McTeer and Aidan Quinn? It's true, that they found the most primitive, original and unspoiled versions of Scots-Irish songs anywhere in the isolated American mountains.

It applies to other things. We think that we're better than Europe--and better than everybody. We think that we avoided all the baggage of the conflicts culminating there in the horror of mechanized warfare and genocide. 

We didn't. We're just behind. The baggage, a nightmare of unreason and religious fanaticism and Calvinist extremism, has overtaken us. We're late bloomers. Witness the racists crawling out of their hiding places.

If anyone cares they can find the most primitive versions of Puritanism and doctrinal absolutism and sectarian resentment right here, transplanted and growing vigorously in the hills and hollers and everywhere else.

Trapped

Oh, Lord. Enjoying an escape from reality only works when you live in reality. But when you live in a dream world--a nightmare, really--it's no fun having the same stuff thrown at you in your leisure.

That's how I felt watching a new installment this evening of Sherlock. Reality: Moriarty walks up and shoots Sherlock dead. Really, dead. How about that for a story line? It's a little low on suspense. 

Reality: Republicans destroy the economy, create inconceivable deficits and debt and make the middle class go away. But the story line, the plot, is all the opposite: they are sane and fiscally responsible.

They are patriots. They create jobs. They love "America." What the hell is "America"? There's not a viable Republican representing real American ideals, traditions and Constitutional practices. 

And yet they go on and on about the Constitution, as though they own the franchise, the fuckers. Their heroes live like Sherlock, with the inevitability of a good outcome, by dint of innate excellence.

We've seen their excellence. Excellence at incompetence. Excellence at lying, cheating and stealing. Excellence at a complete lack of virtue. Write it up, Dr. Watson, into a good story. Reality sucks.

House, but On Fire

I've been watching the hospital drama House on Netflix. Here we have another, cranky, heroic white man saving lives left and right. Someone will build a statue some day, blah, blah, blah. 

Typically, though, the way of the white boys is that of George W. Bush, Donald Rumsfeld and Dick Cheney, honkey screw-ups with a sure sense of their own competence and self-worth.

They deserve incarceration and censure but it would at least be good to see a national, global or cosmic consensus on their collective, unparalleled failure. Man, did they kill a lot of people.

Bold white boys need to be more circumspect. There's no need for more heroic, fictional characters reassuring them of their superiority. It results in a kind of bottomless moral blindness.

The House of Bush still thinks it will be proved right. History already proves them wrong but "instant forgetting" is their friend. That, and the conservative rewrite of history, protect them.