Graham, Negative

Lindsey Graham, at last, has come out against Donald Trump and Ted Cruz. He's shocked, he says, shocked to learn that there's gaming going on in the place. Your winnings, sir. 

Add him to the list. Right, yes, it's only been going on, flagrantly, for forty years or more. You live by the crazy, you die by the crazy. Republicans have fanned the crazy flames for decades.

Using leaf blowers, or something. Where were you, Lindsey, when all the insanity went on? What did you do to stop it? George W. Bush! Ring a bell? Who's sorry now. It's too damn late, for us all.

Terabithia? Is That Anywhere Near Terre Haute?

It's way too tempting to think that imaginary worlds are neatly walled off from reality. Everyone's world is to some extent imagined. It can be imagined in a healthy and optimistic way, with some grounding in reality, or be a playground for vanity and insecurity and fear.

The cool thing about accepting the creative aspect of one's outlook is that it can then be managed. If it's creative and subjective and chosen it might as well be productive and pleasant. The way things are seen, in other words, isn't about establishing objective truth. 

There is no objective truth. Not at our level of discernment. It's all muddled. So the way things are viewed is more a matter of belief and expectation. Seeing nastiness has little to do with discerning it but a lot to do with its creation, helping to will it into existence. 

Ronald Reagan's imagined world was pleasant. But it was exclusive. It was pleasant only for his clan of insiders. It was contemptuous of everyone else. That's the world Republicans have been creating by believing it already existed: judgmental, segregated and polarized. 

It's an unpleasant place and we're stuck in it. It's a sham world created by power-hungry people.

What a Boner!

What a boner Donald Trump must have at this point. And Hillary, too. It's all about them, their egos and ambitions. What about us?

Bernie really cares about us, more so than anyone in a long time. That's what I think. No boner there. It's actually a job, the presidency.

It's not an audition to be an icon. It's not supposed to be. No hard-on, maybe, but Bernie's got a bigger dick than those others.

Bernie's a man.

People's Strengths and Weaknesses...

are different aspects of the same attributes.

Ad Maiorem Mei Gloriam

One problem when someone identifies with God is that their interests become indistinct from God's. As a group evangelicals excel at this. 

But Antonin Scalia did it as well. The result is moral blindness. Such a person can do all kinds of harm and never look back. That is Scalia's legacy. 

He promoted himself and no one else. 

A Paler Shade of White

The Republican Party is the pale-faced party and getting paler all the time, ensuring the inevitability of their own demise.

But what will be left? Not much, probably. They are too envious to care. They would rather leave nothing than lose control.

Tarzan-sans

Get ready for the loin-cloths. Trump's, of course, will be shiny-gold and snazzy as hell and encrusted with jewels and have his name on it, front and back. These white guys were parachuted in among the heathen as infants and, of course, their genetic excellence and superiority are now manifest and they are swinging through the trees while the rest of us dance around a fire chanting gibberish and living in the sub-prime squalor we deserve.

Thank God for those white men, in the forest canopy above, giving us a glimpse of their goodness as we see them from the depths of our inferiority, looking up into their furry... Oh, shit! TM-something! And, you know, I've got a bunch of earthy friends down here, in the forest-slums and, well.... You can't help but notice. No wonder Trump and his team are greasing the trees. The last thing they want is to have to compete with us.

Welcome to Hell

The "prosperity gospel" movement, apart from the heresy, is an unbelievable insult to common sense and decency. Its proponents believe that God showers good things on the faithful.

And they have found their man, their shot at legitimacy and the big time. It's Donald Trump. You see, the way to be sure of God's favor is when someone is rich and it can't possibly be by merit.

Then it must be by God. That's the simple reasoning. Enter Donald. He isn't good. He isn't competent. He isn't anything. He's an utterly worthless person. He must have been favored by God. 

The Nice Nazi

Hearing anybody eulogize Antonin Scalia makes me ill. He was a Nazi. He was a person for whom ideas took precedence over people.

He believed in authority. He believed in strength. He believed in himself. In that last he was a fascist in a non-fascist role, a purveyor of personality.

He believed in a national personality conveyed in the Constitution and known to him to the point of identification, so he was yet another racist.

His sense of rightness came from a quality rooted in his being, that is, not from thinking rightly. He was a prophet interpreting a religious text.

He was smart as hell but it was used only to serve his masters, the lords of the flat-earth, who reckon that what you see is what there is. 

So he was a literalist, the Constitution's equivalent of Biblical fundamentalists, destroyers of meaning. He was all law and no spirit. 

He was a fucking monster. 

Booger Nights

If we are doomed to a Trump presidency I at least want to make some money on it. It's what he would do. It's what Republicans have been doing for years. 

I'll make a movie about the man. It will be a mash-up of Boogie Nights and Saturday Night Fever, what with the swagger and the hair. No doubt Trump will play himself.

Disco Donald--there you have it, a fool for dancing and he's well financially endowed. He's in slick clothes with moves to match. Always the center of attention, our little Donnie. 

Another Brick in the Wall

Cruz. Rubio. Trump. 

What does it matter.

They're all bricks in a wall.

Restoring Our Strength

My theme song for Bernie Sanders is Let's Work Together. Here's a version:

https://m.youtube.com/watch?list=RDwGGW4IezbC4&params=OAI%253D&v=wGGW4IezbC4

La Scalia

For some symbolic reason I always pictured Antonin Scalia in a frumpy, older wool sweater with some pilling and with his hair somewhat unkempt and staticky and with a little crustiness at the corners of his mouth, and with floating dust and smoke visible around him in soft, streaming light--a vision of fuzz and scuzz in dicey resolution contrasting with the sharpness of his mind. That latter is acknowledged by everyone. Now in the vision he is dead on a wooden floor. Everything else is the same.

I can't see him differently. The guy had a problem. The mental acuity was not counterbalanced but made possible by moral and scholarly frumpiness--an imperative to see things as they weren't--because his kind of consistency and exactitude can only exist in an abstract and imaginary world. He had to believe in certainty where it wasn't, in clarity where it isn't and in definitive answers where they aren't. I guess it was out of fear and a Manichean mindset, that it's authority or chaos. 

It's a bit right-brain and creative and more traditionally feminine, in the way that Catholicism is all of these, and less strictly scientific and analytical. His analyses were Jesuitical and Socratic. He could defend anything, and did, because his reason was in the service of the greater glory of something else and not independent and accountable. This is all well enough but it's un-American. It's rationalization. It's validity depends wholly on the initial insight. It depends on the man himself.

And he was wrong.

Nothingness. Oblivion. Ah, Hope.

Donald Trump. Ted Cruz. Ah, Bernie Sanders.

Streams of Conservative Consciousness

There are identifiable elements in the new conservativism. The money and privilege faction is one. Another is comprised of evangelical Christians and their allies. A third is authoritarian.

The money crowd thinks they were born better, the evangelicals that they were pre-chosen, and the authoritarians that the world embodies justice--that power is goodness.

What they have in common is racism. 

Texas. It's a Mess.

Please, please, please. Secede!

If Ever I Should Leave You

The most terrifying thing about the leading three candidates for the presidential nomination, on the Republican side, is that Donald Trump is the least terrifying. 

If there was ever a time to leave the United States this is it. 

The Munchurian Candidate

Ted Cruz is back on top, a brainwashed psychopath intent on the realization of his vision of the United States as a proto-communist dictatorship. How so? For Cruz the class struggle is subsumed to the Darwinian struggle for survival, the class struggle being but one, corporate aspect of the brutal, state-of-nature situation into which God has plunged humanity for His inscrutable reasons. 

It's inscrutable because of the inconsistency of the position that life is a punishment and a test with a known outcome. Cruz and his cabal of conservative, neo-confederate followers and other adherents to Calvinist precepts are believers in predestination, a disavowal of free will. And, yet, they soldier-on as though it matters, as though there are indeterminate outcomes in a determinate world, and as though God's omnipotence somehow falls short in the endowing of free will.

Cruz was brainwashed at a young age and is unaware of the goals of his programmers, the overthrow of the U. S. government in favor of a totalitarian, religious state. His unconscious mind, abetted by conscious elements, rebels on his behalf in trying to assert free will with a cry for attention by fabricating national ailments, made-up self-diagnoses, such as homosexual gangrene, health insurance leprosy and debt dementia. It's all proxy and projection, an indirect and encoded message.

The moral decay imputed to society is his, but his megalomania and ambition have resulted in misdiagnosis on a national scale. In fact, this behavior is a disorder in itself, a syndrome, and is creating other maladies through its strength and its virulence, the neurosis having infected an entire political party and overwhelmed several Southern states, including Texas, his home. His family is deeply implicated in the delusion and its compulsion and will surely never recover. 

The fear of censure and retribution will ensure it even if there should be some glimpse of reality, the family members having witnessed, more so than anyone, the father's determination and violent, persecutory fantasy life, as seen in his interest in the death penalty, deportation and other punitive measures. He is determined that we become his national family--he the papa figure, the president, and we the national hostage-children. What a fate in a democracy!