Free Birds: It Smells Like Something

And it isn't "teen spirit" but decomposition. The new, fundamentalist-conservative movement needs an anthem, a song suggesting the waste and destruction of a circle of hell out of Dante. 

The essence would be an all-involving sensory experience of decay and decadence, a powerful nasal vortex of denial and delusion and the rotting ideals of our democracy. Let's say Free Bird.

It's a shit song airing infantile fantasies of escapism, a me-first imperative and an anti-social longing for arrestedness. It's all about refusing to grow up and be responsible for anything.

The new conservatives inherited everything and will leave nothing. And, no, they can't change. They are vultures flying away from the bones of our democracy. There's nothing left to eat.

Bathroom Fundamentalists

We see again that conservatives have bathrooms on the brain. They're so literal minded. They have to imagine everything in invasive detail, like gay sex. 

Their asses quiver. Now, in North Carolina, they've guaranteed that the person formerly known as Bruce Jenner will have to report to the boy's bathroom.

Everyone will certainly be more comfortable with that. Maybe Caitlyn will find a Republican there tapping his toes, making for an interesting encounter.

Thom Tillis has tackled the whole hand-washing thing so it's safe to say that North Carolina is first in potty politics, a new slogan for the Old North State.

What's That Gnashing Noise?

Are Republicans grinding their teeth out of guilt? I don't think so. Remember one of our useful points of reference in tracking their malfeasance: selectively weak stomachs. 

Hundreds of thousands of people are dead because a Republican boy-wonder wanted to play with his war toys. Not a problem! They crash the world economy with deregulation.

Aw, shucks. But you soil their honor, suh? Indignant, they will send someone after you, failing to show up themselves because they're too busy running things. Regretfully.

But Trump's war whoops were learned at Cheney-land, a theme park for torturers and sadists, a world domination fun-place. Oh, and about Trump's anti-immigration insanity?

Only some harmless race-baiting and nothing to worry about, they say, while grinding away. If Republicans are grinding their teeth it's only because they might lose an election. 

It's not about guilt or because they care. They can't pretend Donald Trump is some new kind of nut. Not on my watch. They've been cultivating these resentments for years.

Weenie World

I had a very definite understanding of what a "weenie" was when I was a kid. It was an overly fastidious boy, one with a old lady inside, a rule-follower and chicken. 

Again and again I find the new breed of nerdy, rich white guys are weenies. And they are way prickly about their mojos because, well, they don't have any.

They never get to the higher, managerial, parental level of things because they are arrested in adolescence--insecure, needy and overly sensitive about status.

Sound like anyone you know? It's weenie-world at the top now, and even the possibility of a Trump presidency, a weenie-in-chief, means we are doomed.

All I Really Want To Do

I give up. I want it over with. Whatever the Republicans want, let's give it to them. Let them run everything. Let the American people see what it looks like. I can't stand it anymore.

Junior

George W. Bush didn't seem to warrant being credited with agency, a tool if there ever was one and in all respects, but with a little distance it looks different.

Even Republicans were assumed not to want to screw things up the way he did. After all, there was that rescue party of old associates and assorted hacks.

The big man ignored them. Now I think that George, Jr., was the truest son of Lee Atwater, the most amazing piece of shit in the history of American politics.

Atwater was daddy Bush's indispensable hunk of garbage and Junior saw it all in Lee--that he, Junior, didn't have to be like daddy and rate on daddy's terms.

Junior saw that he could outshine the old man or at least make good as a piece of shit and forever get the weight of being a hopeless, mutant blue-blood off his back.

Following Junior there appeared to be the abandoning of that level of recklessness but, no. We see now that it will go on until the country is in the gutter.

George W. Bush was an agent of destruction and a clear, linear part of the larger plan of making the country so weak that only the rich will be left standing.

He's a Brick

All of you have heard, no doubt, the term to brick something, to turn it into a paperweight, as in "oh, Junior bricked his iPad."

Or, in a real-life example, "oh, little Georgie Bush bricked the Middle East, and the world economy, and everything else he touched."

In GOP circles this is considered a useful skill and is encouraged and rewarded. After 40 years of their work our government is bricked.

So, what's up with Donald Trump? Is he a bricker or a brickee or outside the model and goal of petrified government?

The Really Bad Outcome...

has already happened.

Red Herrings on the Grudge Bus

Picture Donald Trump's campaign for president, his magical mystery tour. It must be on a bus. It will be Donald and the not-so-merry pranksters. 

Now that Republicans have actually wrecked the country there's a shift afoot, from happy-talk, their hollow reassurances and impossible promises.

The new tactic, with all the misery they have created, is control of the blame-game. Get ready for a lot of bogeymen, scapegoats and red herrings.

A Man for All Seasoning

To a casual observer Donald Trump seems to need seasoning, but I don't know whether like firewood or food.

Bully for You

Bullying is a kind of privilege. The point of bullying is that the bully won't be treated the way he is treating others, that there are different standards for different people and groups of people.

And differing standards is privilege. So, witness the new conservative nexus of privilege, where the abuse they heap on others is assumed never to work in reverse, never to recoil against them. 

Man, they wouldn't like that, to get back what they've been giving out. Watch Fox News for a while and see. It's the bully's pulpit. And a place from which the golden rule is clearly banned.

Savoir-faire

The Trumpian ticket is savoir-faire, with some je ne sais quoi rooted in his status as an ubermensch. It's hard to capture the guy in normal parlance and lingo, literalism being inadequate to describe the personality stream. The man is a human tweet cascade, a waterfall of incoherent nothingness.

What Does It Mean...

when the crazy people start saying that something is crazy? It means big trouble, I bet. Suddenly, Republicans are discovering crazy, the ones that aren't crazy.

But they were crazy, before, the ones who are saying it's crazy now. How do we know they, the supposed ex-crazies, aren't still crazy? I need a break from this. 

And we all need a break, from Republicans. It's time for their time in the wilderness. Let them be gone. Think of how good it could be, like with the secession of Texas.

It's the stuff that dreams are made of.

Their Kampf

Republicans have such a struggle. They have to make America great again. They have to take back the country. They have to save America from the horror of Obamacare and so on.

It's a struggle to see who gets to own the struggle, who is aggrieved. The Koch boys and their allies, it would seem, are aggrieved. They are plagued by wealth and immense power. 

Koch daddy was insane and a sadist but that's how you get to be a patriot, sucking off the surrogate daddy/state to even it up somehow. And they have to endure the idiot Democrats.

Then they have to struggle against the horrible, poor slobs trying to make it off the nanny-state, not that those people have a grievance, such as being screwed sideways.

The rich and their allies have got the kampf between their teeth and they run with it. They need it. They have to have enemies and, so, worst case, they make them up. 

How handy it is to be able to make stuff up, whenever you want.

No Worries, Muchachos

The North Carolina Tea-Party legislature is bringing Mexican economics to America. Historically, in Mexico, relatively few families of mostly Spanish descent control everything.

Taxes on inheritance and capital gains are nothing or minimal and sales taxes are high, about 16%, so it's incredibly regressive. Tea Partiers, look it up: regressive. Sorry to use big words.

Of course, the position of the state's governing elite, who were bought on the cheap (at) by a discount chain called Rose's, is that it will somehow work out, as with all tax cuts.

Through a miracle and magical thinking cutting taxes on the rich benefits everyone and the overall economy and doesn't create deficits, a Republican perpetual motion machine.

And, if you believe in that...

Trump for Resident

I've decided it's okay if Donald Trump continues to live in the country. But that's as far as I can go. I think it's a fair compromise.

His Way

There are things about which reasonable people can't disagree because it challenges the whole notion that life is intelligible. Surely one of these is that the theme song for Donald Trump's inauguration, as president, must be My Way, with lyrics customized for the occasion. Sing it, Sir!

So what if it sucks 

I don't give a damn

I built it myself

It's all glitz and glam...

Apostle Posse

It puzzles me that Ted Cruz and people like him, whose identities are all tied up in Christianity, worry so much about the morality of other people and so little about their own.

They must feel certain about their salvation. Where they get that certainty and the role of moral enforcer from the Bible I don't know. Look at Judas, the great betrayer of Christ. 

There is no Apostle posse. No one judges Judas and chases him around. Cruz and his fellow Christians should worry a lot more about themselves and lot less about others. 

And they should cut it out with the self-righteousness, criticism and the moral enforcer stuff. Whatever was good enough for the Apostles should be good enough for them. 

Rebuke Cruz

I see that the National Rebuke has endorsed Ted Cruz. Hooray, I say, and good for them. In the Reagan days they could maintain they weren't crazy.

Ronnie was just a boy with a dream. And good hair. And a nice, slightly ruddy, complexion. Reagan had a dream. Really, a delusion. He lived in a dream.

But Ted Cruz is a nightmare. It will catch up with them, the National Rebuke crowd. They will be seen for what they are, our national nut-balls.

Conservatives, I Understand

Conservatives, I understand. You think that something is different now. You think that poor people are now poor because they are immoral and incompetent. 

You think that long ago, let's say, in Jesus's day, it was different because there was scarcity. There weren't enough resources to go around. Poverty was unavoidable.

But we're awash in resources now and only inferior people are poor. Why don't you just say so. It's okay to be mean. You can be smug, self-satisfied assholes. 

I say it's okay but don't pretend you're anything else. Then we can fight it out with you fairly. Which we will, I tell you, but stop lying. Embrace the contempt. 

It suits you.

Personnel Problems

Everyone knows how the bad stuff usually gets done. The people at the top, who order it or set it in motion, are insulated by their distance from the implementation. Their hands seem clean.

The implementers don't feel responsible because they're following orders or falling in line with the intent of the higher-ups. This way horrible things can happen and no one feels responsible.

The Night They Drove Old D.C. Down

It would seem that the Southerners finally have their revenge. They have taken over America and made it more like the Confederacy, that distorted state, than anyone would have thought possible. 

Privilege and property are everything now. The blue-bloods, the old Republican elites, are at last wondering what they got into bed with but it's too late. The racist, bigot-crazies have taken over.

Bonfire of the Vanities

Involuntarily I sometimes have an image of myself as having appeared, dream-like, at a huge bonfire not only apparently commemorating but resignedly celebrating the end of our American culture, whatever it was in the first place.

I wonder if it ever really existed. I can't reconcile what we are now with what I thought we were previously. There's plenty of beer at the bonfire and it's so big it doesn't present as an event, where the crowd has some cohesion, but as a spectacle.

Someone throws a chair on the fire. It seems to represent the sadness and futility of trying to make something decent out of life. If we Americans can fail the way we have it means humanity's problems aren't circumstantial, at root, but inherent in us, our kind.

That's sad but it's a pure, species corollary to the sadness any normal person feels about their own mortality and the utter weirdness of contrasting the importance of your existence to yourself with the incomprehensible extent of our actual inconsequence.

I've always found that awkward awareness lightening and liberating. All the irritating, everyday crap becomes nothing. It all seems like nothing. So now I'm trying to feel that way about our country and species, that it was destined to end and that it's not a big deal.

Live and Let Die

Here we have the conservative and, especially, Trumpian vision for America: they live and they let everyone else die. They'll help the dying along, in fact.

EMERGENCY!

I recall telling one of my neighbors, who is a chemical-phobe, that she needed to make a decision about the Bermuda Grass increasingly infiltrating her vegetable garden.

It would be all or nothing. She needed to attack it or it would take over the garden and destroy it, turning it into a useless monoculture. She eventually used an herbicide. 

It's an emergency, I had to say, to try to get her to understand. It isn't going away and it will mean the end of the garden. Complacency won't cut it. Cooperation is capitulation. Compromise is concession.

Now, THIS IS OUR EMERGENCY MOMENT.

The sirens are going off. The bombs rain down. The enemy is upon us. We need Neo-con d-Con. Roundup for Republicans. Roach motels for Rubios. Agent Orange for O'Reilly. 

We need to crush Rush. I tell you, people, this is it. It is our defining time. We will be remembered for our inaction and incompetence, as it stands. Doing nothing is not acceptable, blundering inexcusable.

It is complicity. It's unpleasant, I know, to take up the fight. Nobody wants to do it but the problem is not going away and it won't fix itself. The conservative menace must be stopped.