Give Him a Microbe

Please, God, give Donald Trump a microbe when he travels to Mexico. May he spend days on the toilet. In Jesus's name, Amen.

The Bastard Doctrine of the Personal Relationship

Even among Protestants the bastard doctrine of the personal relationship with Christ is not mainstream and had late origins. It's the illegitimate and delinquent child of a wayward father, predestination. Evangelicals are like long haul truckers on the CB radio with Jesus, their good-buddy. Breaker, breaker! Life is a necessary nuisance between destinations. 

For non-believers the existence and triumph of evil is a fatal insult to the idea of God. Evangelicals, in attributing to God person-to-person involvement in saving grace, thereby implicate God in the particularities of evil. But grace is impersonal and freely available to anyone and so the presence of evil and injustice within the system is no reflection on God.

The refusal to take advantage of grace is an individual's choice. There's nothing irresistible about it. I'm probably resisting it right now because of that idiot, Trump, and the Palinites and the Fox News crowd who screw with my equanimity and equilibrium, they themselves being evidence of God's neglect of particularities. It's our domain. God gave it to us.

God's perfection is at a cosmic scale. Evangelicals are guilty of moral cowardice and self-importance and idolatry. Evangelicals can't handle freedom so they invented a belief in the certainty and inevitability of their salvation. They think they know they are going to heaven. Jesus told them so on the born-again radio-band so they spend their time judging others.

This insulting doctrine coincides well with the racism of evangelicals.

Individuals are prejudicially born in the same way as the white race. Predestination plays out interestingly among the sons of the fathers, Jerry Falwell, Jr., Franklin Graham, Richard Roberts and the rest. They just happen to have been chosen, (pre)destined for salvation, and also intended for adulation and higher incomes than in used car sales and other jobs.

There must be a genetic component to salvation. Silly me. I always thought it was God's prerogative. I thought that everything was God's prerogative. In next week's lesson we will debunk literalism, a hateful doctrine limiting the vast wisdom of the Bible and another example of the misunderstanding and fearful outlook of the fundamentalists.

The Code of the Shysters

Even crooks have moral codes. The difference is that the crook code applies unevenly and doesn't include precepts such as "fair play" and the "golden rule" and the ones about not killing and not screwing your neighbor's wife and so on. 

Look at Roger Ailes. The man is a cesspool and he's revered and rich and a kingmaker and now sits at the hand of his latest project, Trump, who is himself a shyster and a crook and a charlatan. It isn't surprising that they are crooked.

But it's surprising that they are admired and supported by the people whose interests they imperil. It is said that Ailes wants to make Trump palatable to the party poobahs and everyone else. We'll see. It doesn't matter much.

We have all already lost by accepting the charade as anything remotely normal. 

Sell-Off and Sell-Out

I buy a lot of stuff for my work on eBay and there are pieces of America's industrial infrastructure for sale there, leftovers from the days when we made things and did things, before the marketers took over and the emphasis changed to spin.

Marketing is just spin. Marketers lie for a living. Some of it was unavoidable, the loss of industry, but not in the wholesale way in which it happened. The working class got sold out by Republicans, who will only do what (big) business wants.

Big business wants cheap labor. That's why the jobs went away, to China and elsewhere. Trump decries this but his policy proposals will only make it worse, as every Republican president has made it worse for decades and in the same way.

Ciao, Ivanka!

Roger Ailes is reinventing himself as Donald Trump's right-hand man. And we know, from the last post, what Donald does with the hand. Where will Ailes turn now for female prey?

We will see. Ivanka?! I mean, hey, these are their standards, not mine! And Donald has said that Ivanka is a strong woman and would be able to assert and defend herself by leaving. 

Ciao, Ivanka!

By His Own Hand

Donald Trump should be charged with public masturbation. He thinks that what he is doing, self-gratification, is an accomplishment and that it should be lavishly rewarded. 

More appropriately, he thinks it should continue to be lavishly rewarded and then the entire act deified in an odd, business-priapic kind of way. Really he's just whacking off. 

How To Succeed in Business Without Really Trying

Picture little Donald Trump on a bicycle on a Brooklyn street. He falls off and starts bawling like a baby. His daddy dusts him off, blames the bike and buys him a new one. 

Similarly among the Kennebunk cowpokers but with a horse, which they would have shot while little Georgie wept. They buy him another horse. And then a baseball team.

Trump Jesus

Some evangelicals, sensing that Trump is, if nothing else, grandiose are deciding that he is the second coming of Christ. No kidding. There was an article to that effect, more or less. It popped up on a mainstream news feed.

It was probably put there as a lesson in the ignorance and boundless insanity of evangelicals. Such people don't deserve to live in a democracy because, if they were in control, it wouldn't be a democracy anymore.

Trump Justice

Justice in Trump-world is whatever he says it is.

Royal My Ass

English class crap makes me crazy. The tradition is that some people are somehow innately superior. In England it's imbedded in everything, so much so that even the lower classes buy into it but the beliefs are somewhat self-fulfilling and so the thing is circular and therefore, as they would say over there, it's rubbish.

Americans now assume innate inequality but with a deterministic twist probably related to the hideous doctrine of predestination. Everything happens because it was supposed to happen and had to happen and was sanctioned and sanctified by God. So the successful are smug and everyone else feels unworthy. 

In other words, everyone loses.

Worst Offer

Perversity. Contrariness. That's all that I can come up with. Add a dash of death-wish. Why in the world would we, probably the luckiest people in the history of humanity, spontaneously run our society into the ground? 

The only thing going for us now is wealth. We are morally bankrupt. Notice how doing the right thing doesn't even come up anymore. We gave up on that while, at the same time, becoming more self-righteous than ever.

We disgust me.

Spin to Win

There are now hit-ads on YouTube going after Hillary and paid for by the NRA. The huge, loathsome, right-wing smear machine is waking up and kicking in. The fiends at Fox will follow, with who-knows-what now that Trump is in the mix, but it will be all spin and distortion for sure.

Moron Factory

Democrats have to face up to the reality that the southern United States is a moron factory. They will vote Republican if the town drunk is their candidate or any reprobate or imbecile.

Among the white people it's uncool to have a social conscience. Politically the region is a write-off. So responsible Americans start out in a hole in the ground, now a very deep one.

The backwardness of the Republican base is frightening and a huge burden.

Belt Drive

It's a known thing that Koch-daddy had the boys beat on one another. No wonder they're so fucked up. I wonder if he beat them himself.

The Geeks and the Irrational

"Rational" has a good ring to it but irrationality has to be respected or it rises up and starts running everything. The average geek lives in a place of Platonic forms. 

The point of comparison is mathematical perfection and purity. In order for these to be achieved whatever is being considered has to be removed from reality. 

One way is to have it die. This is how technical culture is inhuman and a false realization of the puritanical goals of perfection, idealization and otherworldliness.

Nothing is good enough. They want to dispense with the messiness of biological existence and the uncertainty of style and the annoyance of anything not technical.

But experientially much of life is like looking at a mini-monster, a gargoyle, from twelve inches away. Most systems are only perfect or attractive or harmonious from a distance.

Faith, typically, enabled people to think that the ugliness is part of a larger thing of beauty. Geeks are frustrated by this, wanting abstract purity where there is wretchedness.

Geek brains work in proximity and by minutiae, the molecular perfection of the parts. But perfect parts can add up to monstrosities at a macrocosmic level, where we all live.

So woe to those who don't care about the macrocosm.

Empowered geeks will not be thwarted and refused. They will bring the world to heel somehow, in their heads, making it intelligible on narrow, Cartesian terms.

Give them a little money and they have delusions of grandeur and magnificence.

People can suffer and die and it's a video game to them. Irrationality, privilege and exclusion are then in command. If you aren't an insider your life is nothing to them.

This is the sociopathic, narcissistic, money-culture of Silicon Valley. 

In their fantasy worlds they are powerful and have a babe and don't have to work much, relating to the fantasy worlds of Republicanism and Libertarianism and Trumpism.

And it relates to the chosen world of the evangelicals, a fantasy-land of the "saved."

Not to mention Roger Ailes and hate media, whose fiefdoms function efficiently in the creation of mini-hells. Outsiders can fuck-off and fly as long as Ailes and his ilk live well.

Trump Thug

The man Trump has hired to run his campaign is a thug and a Palinite, a really low form of life. But remember that this is nothing new. Lee Atwater got Bush-daddy elected and he was an unprecedented piece of garbage. Rove was a cynical, flaming horror. 

We have been plotting our own demise for forty years. Let's not pretend we don't deserve it. We must loathe ourselves. What decent person can look at the Trump mess without shame and revulsion. The forces of hate and self-destruction are strong now. 

Trump's Fantasy Island Retreat

There was an article on Jared and Ivanka and it was not reassuring. They are the attractive and less obviously hostile individuals among the aborigines on Trump Island. These two are the ones who lure you to the luau at which you will be eaten, with a side of poi. 

It's an island of financial cannibals. If we isolate them long enough they will have to start eating one another or resort to a change of diet, so quarantine is the best course. Remember, now, stay away from Trump Island! Don't be fooled by the hula skirts!

Coming of Rage

What we're looking at with Trump is a reaction relating to the realization of loss. The loss wasn't averted but was actualized among the white working class. We can hope that they are in an early, irrational stage in the grief and that it will pass. 

People hate going backwards. Voting for Trump is about anger and denial but the lives of that class have changed forever. They better get over the denial because they are only hurting themselves. Politics is not a good venue for the venting of rage.

Trumpicons

Trumpism is an identity movement. It's not about character or behavior but class and clan. Christianity is about behavior. Americanism is about behavior. Trump is about anger.

Adherents to Trumpism are dazed-pissed and confused. There should be memes and identicons, called Trumpicons, representing the phenomenon of the losers who want Trump. 

Their anger has made them vulnerable and stupid. I wish that they wouldn't drag the rest of us down with them. It's not fair. Their talk of hope masks despair and will mean trouble.

Jeff Secessions

When I read something about some load of shit like Jeff Secessions of Alabama I have to speak out. Jeff (is it Jefferson?) and his fellow Southern apologists are racists. 

Racism is treason. Racism is such a fundamental violation of the constitutional principles and worthy traditions of America it represents a full-out betrayal of the state.

To the extent that racism is a force America is not America. Racism is not an infraction or foul it is a denial of who we are and the basic rights of citizenship and humanity. 

On this I am a fundamentalist. Now Jeff is trying hard to get Donald Trump elected and ensure that they can destroy America with alacrity, something I am against. 

I think a witch-hunt is appropriate but it sounds antagonistic so it will be done legislatively and through public pressure. I will refer this whole thing to higher authority.

I will hand it over to my friend Daniel.

Daniel is higher authority because he is black. Black people have incredible skills at detecting racist code talk and other hypocritical, two-faced bullshit. 

That is, all of the white lies.

I want to go after Jeff Secessions first because I can't stand him and then Tom Cottonmouth. Lying isn't an activity for them but existential, a state of being.

And, yes, boys, I'm calling you traitors. 

Daniel will tease out the details and provide specific instances of racist code talk. We will attack them with these. Meanwhile I am calling for the destruction of Stone Mountain.

It's the famous, Confederate Mount Rushmore.

It makes no sense to have a memorial to traitors. We know how the South invented a mythology about the Civil War to save face. Enough of that. They were all traitors.

Crazy Coefficients in the Trump and Neocon Equations

Trump's crazy coefficient is very high and it's even more horrifying when he makes sense because you understand how screwed up we are independently of him. 

A lot of the neocons, for example, despise Trump because he doesn't share their mania. Trump at least knows when to declare bankruptcy and give up on a project. 

Mostly it's not his money anyway. And he plays the averages.

As little accountability as there is in Trumpland there is none at all among the neocons. Some of Trump's projects have failed. All of the neocon's have failed.

And I don't know of a prominent neocon who lost a kid in one of their wars, let alone risked their own life. They play the the averages with other people's lives.

In a situation with accountability they would be gone.

But they have reinvented themselves in other roles and with other titles, neo-whatever, and are continuing to plant the seeds of our imperial destruction.

I Claim Superiority

I spent decades getting educated well enough to realize how little I knew. On the basis of that I claim superiority on the Rumsfeld Scale.

I think I know what I don't know. Contrast that with the entire right-wing movement and the cultivation of ignorance.

Democrat (sic)

It makes me nuts that even Democrats use "democrat" as the adjectival form of their own title. It's a slur and an insult and a slap in the face invented by Republicans.

Invasion of the Bodice Snatchers

Casually viewed Republican sexuality relies more on prohibition and titillation than the more conversational Democratic version. Democrats are more prosaic about sex. 

I like the Republican approach but in practice it's unusually extreme because Republican minds are now so morally stunted and unintegrated and incapable of nuance they will deny they're doing something while doing it in front of you, a potentially problematic and destructive behavior.

"I didn't screw that maiden" or "I always tap my toes in the stall" must be quick-replies programmed into conservative cell phones everywhere, but it's one thing for an oaf like Ailes to play Fabio with the shopgirls and another for the neocons to get hundreds of thousands of people killed. 

Bodice-ripping needs to be addressed insistently because lesser forms of denial are gateway behaviors for homicide. Denial is a bad habit and more severe when the transgression is more severe and the stakes higher. Evangelical preachers routinely dip their dicks into the congregational pool.

Then they weep in front of the assembly and claim repentance and carry on, sometimes even with the dick-dipping, the brazen cynics.

The lesson is to punish the lesser infractions proscriptively and disproportionately in order to avoid the homicides. Conservatives can't object because they've been doing this for decades and at every opportunity with black men, albeit unjustly. I'm fantasizing about how to punish Roger Ailes. 

Prison, I think, at the very least. It would be good therapy for him to try the submissive role in a sexual relationship, anyway. Let's see how he likes it.

sorry.gov

I wonder if anyone owns this web address. Surely it will be wanted in Washington where "nobody home" is the routine reply, like your typical telecom customer service. The meaning is "get lost."

The government is supposed to look out for and serve the citizens, not lobbyists and wealthy corporations and other subgroups. Sorry, citizens, your government is permanently out to lunch.

Oh, Great. Now We're Implicated in the Holocaust

Since the right-wing went tribal and "us-vs-them" Islam is seen as monolithic. If White, Western, Christian culture is seen as similarly monolithic it produced the Holocaust, so I guess we're implicated in that now.

And some other things, like the Inquisition and the decimation of native populations all over the world. More directly, throw in the Democratic Utopia of Iraq. Good job, right-wing. Thanks for dragging us into the shit.

Degrees of Dishonor

I hate to see the hard work of Republican legislators be unrecognized. Most of these guys have degrees and I hope and expect that their schools have the sense to be ashamed of them except for Bob Jones and Oral Roberts and Liberty Universities. 

So I am recommending that their degrees be dishonored and revoked. My own alma mater produced John Boehner and he did nothing but comfort the rich and savage the poor for his whole career which, at least when I was there, was not a point of honor. 

Boehner is reputed to be working happily in retirement on a new thing, a porta-bar that will fit Into a golf bag and a nicer one that will go into a golf cart. He was last seen happily swinging a club while smoking and is said to live at the Nineteenth Hole. 

Time Travel Analysis

In my virtual and proprietary Time Travel Analysis I have Paul Ryan substituting for Bobby Kennedy in his trip to the Mississippi Delta in 1967.

Where Kennedy had been horrified by the conditions Ryan was thrilled at seeing first hand the necessary and character building hardship endured by poor people.

He especially loved to see the blank stares of the children.

Ryan ate it up and pictures of his smiling face amidst the hollow checks and dead eyes of the migrant workers and tenant farmers will be posted. His security detail is not pictured.

But they had guns trained on the rabble from nearby. In our next Time Travel installment we will consider George W. Bush in the role of Franklin Roosevelt in WWII.

See you then and Sieg Heil!

Living is Easy

Living easy is still the white man's prerogative in America. Everything else is table scraps.

Self Service

Some poor guy died in India after being hit by a car and lying on the side of the road for more than an hour as people drove by. I'm not that horrified.

It goes on all the time, even in America. Not exactly in this form but Paul Ryan is a huge proponent, an example of the "fuck you" brand of civil servant.

He's a public employee of the Gingrich mold, starting out in middle class obscurity. Gingrich was a teacher at a crap college when he went into politics.

Several wives later he's flying around in private airplanes, through the miracle of public service. Grover Norquist never got elected to anything, that I know.

He's spent his life sucking off a system he says he hates. Listen for those turboprops. Do you hear them? The idiot flew to Burning Man in a private plane.

They love to decry the "nanny state." 

That's because it pulls resources from the daddy-state, their American government, which enables them to live like it's summer vacation all the time.

They are extremely jealous of these resources, hence the defensiveness and reactivity. It's not that they're against sucking off the government. 

They just want it all for themselves.

Taking America Black

Tom Cotton and his type cause me despair. He's a jerk. He's young and seems healthy. We're stuck with him forever. I can only figure that in the agricultural South there was a parallel arm of the selective breeding of slaves, the selective breeding of white assholes to maintain their system of horror. 

There's no other way to explain the purity and pervasiveness of these guys.

So, in the spirit of affirmative action, I am recommending that we turn the administration of the country over to black people. Only black people will be able to run for office. Only black people will have high administrative authority. I also want to make the Post Office entirely black. I don't know why.

It feels right. The transportation departments in the various states were welfare for white boys for decades. Anyway, the precedent for this is obvious, the preferential treatment of white people. It seems to be more entrenched than we ever thought. We're nearly issuing hunting licenses on black guys. 

My proposal is the only way to break the cycle and keep people like Cotton and Cruz from turning us into a racist theocracy. That white voters thought Sarah Palin should have any serious role in government is reason enough as is the rise of Trump. Only black people can make America great again.

A Call for Kicking and Screaming

I thought that if America lost its freedom there would be more kicking and screaming. We must have expected someone to show up in a devil suit and announce his intentions: "I am here to take your freedom, please stand aside." Trump is this herald. There may be horns under the hair.

The point of a normal society is the greater good: to curtail the forms of freedom that interfere with someone else's. Not plowing recklessly through intersections is a small price to pay for the carnage it saves. There are harder decisions about this when you get into the middle ground.

Graduated marginal tax rates are somewhere in the middle. Actually, no, not for me but still it's an example. Here's a thought, that we lost the ability to make these decisions even on the "small price" end of the spectrum because we are no longer a people. We are a house divided. 

We have always been divided but somehow we made it work. The biggest division is over race. We made it work when black people were disenfranchised. Here's another thought, that the Republican Party has become an asylum for racists, their refugee camp. They speak another language.

The language is code-talk and innuendo. They are unable to say what they mean which is "I am here to take your freedom, please stand aside." It's too forthright and declarative. What's surprising, though, is how forthright it's getting to be in the absence of appropriate kicking and screaming.

It's getting more forthright in the form of Donald Trump who isn't, I believe, a refugee in the conflict over race but he's an opportunist with a receptive audience full of racists. It's a huge disgrace he's gotten so far. It's time for kicking and screaming. Whatever we're doing it isn't enough.

The Invisible Umbilical and Planet Trump

I was trying to explain to somebody how someone, let's just say Bill O'Reilly, could do nothing but spit out lies and not be a liar and not be insane. It's the power of the human psyche to fragment and compartmentalize and rationalize at work here. 

It's as though Bill has an invisible umbilical feeding him lies from some mother-lode, a dark place where lies and the truth are indistinct or the distinction is irrelevant. The currency there is power and the ability to be arbitrary and in control. But Trump is another animal. 

Trump is a despot and his own dark-star or at least a sizable subplanet in close affiliation with the mothership of horror. He is not a point of the transmission of chaos, as is Bill, but a place of its creation. He defines a zone within which the truth is what he says it is.

He is his own false idol. This means that he is evil and I say that without condemnation. It's not my place to condemn anybody but in my tradition making yourself a rival of God Is serious shit and this is what he is doing. So I guess I condemn him but it's not personal. 

If he will stop I will stop and I will no longer condemn him, just to show that there's no ill will. Herr Donald, are you there? I know, he's somewhere shooting his mouth off again, certain that there will never be any consequences no matter what he says.

Overcompensation

I've never wanted to live anything other than an unobtrusive life, even on the money front. I didn't want to be too implicated in anything, certainly not the tidal wave of waste now represented by our American culture. 

I copped an attitude on this at an impressionable age, having read E. F. Schumacher and other early environmental and social writers, and I found that I liked having a hard connection with productive work. 

For which, when I got paid, I would buy things like food and shelter and clothing, avoiding any ego-enhancing effects that might ensue by being overcompensated for doing nothing, like being a lawyer or something.

My ego is still uninflated and in fact I feel more vulnerable than I like, thanks to the irrepressible political insanity of the Republicans, who seem to only respect being overcompensated for doing nothing. 

It's a strange world.

Serial Harasser Punished With $40 Million Windfall!

Oh, those crazy Republicans. They do like to have a good time.

Shit-Owning in the Age of Trump

Few conservatives have been willing to own their shit on the Trump fiasco by admitting that they sold their souls to and for his indispensable voting bloc, the NASCAR crowd. Kathleen Parker came close in panning Palin. I'm sure it's hard to peer out of that comfortable, Republican womb and look at the failure of their policies and the abandoning of their principles. I say, to those with a small government fixation, that this includes the military. That is the subtext of the Second Amendment. 

We were never supposed to have large, standing armies and massive arsenals and war matériel scattered everywhere, saying nothing of their huge, mutant Bush-baby, the NSA. Okay, I will stipulate that technology, notably nukes, has changed the game. And how did innovation not change education and healthcare as well? Whoa, we can't fund those! And why not? The strength of America was supposed to be in its people, more so than in expeditionary forces and war hardware.

There's some shit-owning wanting on the other side, where the Democrats continue to wallow in PC verbiage that even I hate. It's inexpressive, suckass language and it shows that the Democrats are in their own weird bubble of self-righteous, hand-wringing, masochistic denial. Luckily for them the sadists on the Right are waiting to grant their wishes. The Republicans have trashed everything they've touched, culminating in the terminator, Trump, and carry on unimpeded by the Democrats.

But the Republicans are now being tripped-up internally by Trump--never yet, God help us, because someone has made a compelling and coherent-enough case against them. The devil, anyhow, in the form of a NASCAR contingent, has shown up on the GOP doorstep with a notice of payment due. They coughed up the votes and now they want their crazy. Oh, this is going to be interesting. I still ask myself how we got here. I've given up thinking we can get out of it. Donald has cured me of that. 

He is the death of hope as surely as if it were a casino. 

We're--No--He's So Vain

Lately I think that Donald Trump is the harbinger of the end of our country as we have known it and maybe the end of civilization. For most of human evolution it's been tough to feel that we humans are anything more than animals. We've won that battle, the one for human exceptionalism.

We have kicked the ass of every other species to an amazing degree. 

And we Americans think that we are the best people in the world. Then we go and elevate a guy who is transparently an animal, nothing more than an appetite, to secular sainthood. The significance if this is as immense as that appetite. We have simply given up on ourselves and humanity.

We have given in to the worst of what we are, embodied in Donald Trump.

Capital-Equivalent

Donald Trump has spent his life stumbling forward in the capital-induced equivalent of a drunken stupor. That is, when he's not out cold.

Banana Republicans: Driven to Destruction

James Salter thought that you had to have an ear for language in order to write well. It's clear to me now that this applies to other things, a lot of things, and that tackling-it isn't enough. You have to have talent. People find creativity and independence hard and attachment easy.

It's a substitute for talent. I think that a certain attractive, sixtyish impulse has played out poorly. Not everybody can do everything and no amount of wanting is going to make it happen. Standards require judging and in a society with limited resources this happens more naturally.

People fail if they aren't good at something and find their niche somewhere else. But with enough money you can continue to fail forever and without repercussions, like George Bush living well after a catastrophic and consistent string of failures. Trump is a seasoned dilettante. 

Who knows what he would and should have been.

It certainly isn't President but maybe El Presidente in a banana republic, kind of like his company. Anyway, it's impossible to know what talents he has because daddy bailed him out every time. Drive is an interesting attribute. Most of the driven losers I knew became lawyers.

I used to swim every day and once, when I worked at a university, there was a loathsome group of guys who swam about the time I did. I knew they were scumbags and jerks because of the way they talked about women in the locker room. Trust me, you would have been offended.

They were the law students.

They're all out there now doing something and they may have changed, especially if they had girl children. Who knows. Clearly Bush is still clueless. Trump is still a pig. "You can be whatever you want" is a catchphrase with our kids. "You can have a try at anything" doesn't sound as good.

But it's more true. Utopianism and perfectionism and exceptionalism take you to strange places. More than anything I think that these are the things playing out right now as the American Dream comes to an end. Democracy itself requires some talent or understanding and we don't have it.

We don't even have the sense to entrust and empower those who do.

"Malice"

If there was ever a tour called "Malice" I would have bet on a heavy metal band and not the campaign of a viable candidate for the U.S. Presidency but, like so many people, I didn't count on Trump and there is no better name for his campaign.

Cheapshots by the Dozens

As a kid I learned about cheapshots and that the technical term for practitioners is "asshole" and we assumed that only a small subset of humanity, the losers, employed them.

They were regarded with pity, fitting their status and assumed numerical insignificance.

But an entire political party now stays in business using cheapshot tactics and it not only goes unavenged but is rewarded. Something went wrong. Can we dial 911?

Are there asshole police out there somewhere?

Bad Vibrations

I'm formulating a plan to have Trump blow up using sympathetic vibrations. You know how things have a wavelength and according to harmonics one thing can vibrate or resonate in sync with another? Trump is already so well amplified I think if we can add to it something might happen. 

He might explode. He always looks close to it.

Or, he might implode, his essential energy being in-sucking. Anyway, we will need to get the wavelength right which I think can be done experimentally by throwing various kinds of meanness and money and inflammatory talk into the Trump camp to see what causes the greatest reflex reaction.

This is an important and ethical undertaking. Let's hope it works.

UPDATE, 8/11/16: It seems to be working! I think he may explode.

Force Quit

This election cycle is like watching the spinning wheel of death on a computer. 

How To Cut the Shit Out of Your Hand

After watching several YouTube videos on sharpening mower blades I went innovative and cut the shit out of my hand. While thinking, I will add, that I was one slip away from cutting the shit out of my hand. 

Trexit

I wonder what would happen if we had a referendum on Trump: embrace or reject our stupidity and go from there. We could get off the horrible, fucking fence we're on. 

Unreal Estate

Trump has opened my eyes to how common is is for the big boys to go bust and come out of it unscathed and sometimes even richer. There's so much money thrown at Trump and his kind the balance sheets are never in focus.

They are swimming in an ocean of capital in unregulated areas. Trump takes tangible assets and turns them into avatars--always of himself--and through his unique skill instead of becoming more real himself the assets become less so.

Getting Ugly for Trump

Anyone who hasn't watched the videos of the anger and racism and ignorance of the Trump supporters should do it. It's sickening but it is where we are. 

The lunatics are no longer the fringe.

Hillary, Listen to Me

Hillary has an O. J. problem with Trump. There was enough evidence to convict O. J. Simpson several times over and it got lost in a tidal wave of information.

Trump is a charlatan and a fraud. There is so much evidence for this it's easy to get lost in it and overwhelmed by the onslaught and spectacle of his self-promotion. 

The attacks on him have to have themes, not potshots and picking away at the edges of his incompetence. And repetition is important. He's an ass, he's a dick, he's a failure...

Here Comes the Bride

I know women who don't even want to get married and they still want "the dress." Donald wants the dress. He doesn't want to be president but the race and the chase are riveting to him and compelling and addicting. He must have the dress.

Let's really give it to him. 

He presents himself as a big man but he's fawning and subservient and a master suck-up. I want the fucker in drag for the oath of office, a wedding dress with all the trimmings if he should win, and "Here Comes the Bride" playing in dramatic fashion.

Only that, for me, will embody our disgrace.

Bad Breakup

The thing that's bad about a breakup is when it happens in such a way that it discredits the entire relationship. I hate that. You can lose stuff that was in the bank, so to speak: all the good memories.

I feel that way about the USA. I have to go back beyond my birth to feel unambiguously good about things so it isn't exactly a memory. Now I see the seeds of our idiocy in everything after that.

If you find yourself thinking often enough "it's not that bad" then it is that bad and you wakeup to Trump. Previously I had made excuses and argued that it was minority rule and not representative.

Who cares anymore. It's bad enough to declare us clinically dead in relation to our ideals. I hereby secede. I realize now I've been heading that way, trying to create a little zone of beauty and sanity.

What else can we do?

Retention Deficit

Rules and standards exist for a reason. I sincerely believe that Republicans once thought that they knew what was best for the country. They thought that it would be a disaster if they didn't have their way and, so, screw everything. The ends justify the means.

But we're way beyond that now. Republicans are running from the realization of their failure on every front. Deregulation has resulted in economic instability and the Great Recession and destroyed domestic production. Tax cuts have bankrupted the government.

Republicans talk all the time about principles and high ideals but our foreign and domestic policies are unconnected to any moral framework and because of that they are incoherent and have failed. And Republicans have put themselves before their country. 

If this isn't treason what is? None of this has been forgotten or is misunderstood or uncertain. It is cynicism and denial: the refusal, out of pride and greed and desperation, to face the reality of what they have achieved, the ongoing dismantling of a once great nation. 

Their unjustified Iraq War is instructive. They now blame the current president. They can't possibly have forgotten that their guy started it and then characteristically installed hacks in important positions resulting in death and disaster and inconceivable waste.

Vicious Vickie Victorious

When I was dating someone six or so years ago a personal history article in the Sunday Times touched a nerve in both of us. I wish I remembered it better but I don't.

A college-age girl had gone home with a friend and discovered an incredibly clannish environment, like a little family mafia. You were with them or with the terrorists.

Never mind that they were terrorists themselves. It made me think of a family I knew as a kid and their enforcer daughter, Vickie. Man, she was cruel. My girlfriend was stunned at the stories and the brilliance of the cruelty and I was stunned that she was stunned. 

I hadn't thought about it but I guess I assumed that it was normal bad shit, but my girlfriend thought that I had encountered an outlier, a prodigy. I still don't know about that.

But being on the inside with them was pretty good, if a little scary because it always felt precarious. You were rewarded for loyalty. But you didn't want to beat them at anything.

It might be trivial to you but it wasn't for them. My sister had been destroyed by grade school cruelty--probably her fate, at the hands of someone--and it turned out to have been Vickie.

I don't blame anybody. Vickie may have been a victim herself of who knows what. But, lately, I am reminded of Vickie and her family again watching the American version of Shameless. 

Vickie was a Fiona doppelgänger. She provided the survival skills but at the evil end of the spectrum. And, before her, the family was utterly unlike this. The older kids were nice.

Their son my age and Vickie were a hit team. My mother had a debilitating stroke and they got off on it and the sufferings of a mutual friend whose brother had killed himself. 

It seemed normal, if vicious. Look at the Gallaghers, in Shameless. People are routinely victimized in life. I remember being cruel myself, but I was in awe of real survival skills. 

I didn't have any or not what I needed. I bet that Vickie has been victorious in her life, wherever she is. I don't feel anything about it. It seems so distant.

Galley Slave

Reflecting on Trump, I think he needs to be repurposed. It won't happen voluntarily but I'm sure he's done something illegal. We should look into that.

And he's a drama queen which means for him it's hero or galley slave. Galley slave it is. It will be tough but the man needs to learn about compassion.

Happy Talk

One good thing about aging in obscurity is that you aren't surprised by your insignificance. But some people don't see theirs and may die with the delusion that they mattered. Think of an egomaniac. 

Think of Trump, maybe. I don't know but it's reassuring to me not to have the worry of self-importance. I'm happy in my insignificance and it's fine. I get a lot of pleasure from little things and try to share.

It's a matter of faith but I always try to share. Somehow we all carry on in an imperceptible way and I want my net effect to have been good. I'll celebrate that tonight with wine and delicious food. 

You can join me by doing the same, or come on over if you're in the area. Red wine is an antidote for lots of things, not the least of which is the egomaniacal insanity around us. Let's celebrate obscurity. 

Speaking of Shame...

Are Americans really too stupid to see the disgrace we've made of ourselves? 

His Spirit Cannot be Quashed

Trying to find a positive thing to say about Donald Trump, I think he has a positive, optimistic outlook. It helps when you have the moral compass of George Bush, with the guiding lights of ignorance and indifference, and when you're born with cash enemas near at hand--oh, damn, it is hard. 

It's hard to say anything positive about such an irredeemable, unrepentant suckass. I mean, he attacks and insults the parents of a killed soldier and then tries to fix it by suggesting there's some equivalency of sacrifice in the jobs he supposedly created inadvertently while increasing his wealth.

He must tremble and weep at the memory. It doesn't even make sense. Where but to hell do we go from there? It is hard to quash his spirit, at any rate, though he has been well rewarded. No matter how little sense it makes he will, for fuck's sake, always come back at you with something. 

In a really sick way the term "indomitable" applies. And please forgive the swearing. Trump will do this to you. I wonder what it would take, in the way of quashing, to shut his ass up. I would pay for that or make a contribution. And screw secrecy. I want it on record exactly who supports him. 

May they live in infamy.

A Genealogy of Political Insanity

Political pathologies don't spring, fully formed, from the head of some operative. They have a history. Minority rule in a democracy is a kind of dysfunction. Simple explanations have a lot of appeal, by dint of their simplicity, but usually don't hold up for long. 

On the other hand there are often undertakings or events that give thematic cohesion to insanity. And observable dysfunction should require an attempt at explanation. So, how did we get to the Trump dysfunction? What is the genealogy of the pathology?

Formally there isn't one because opportunism doesn't constitute belief. Trump's the opposite of an ideologue. He doesn't care about anything, except himself, for which he expects to be praised. Far from being held to a fixed idea Trump is entirely untethered. 

Or he is, more plausibly, tethered only to himself. 

He really is an island. Now, then, as such he's only buoyed by a political pathology so we have to look at that liquid medium, Trump voters. Their sickness is rooted in America's original sins, racism and greed. The players are an arrogant North and an injured South. 

Ronald Reagan used Jerry Falwell for votes and then ignored him. Surprise, people don't like being used and ignored. There's a long history of Northern insults and Southern hurt. Desegregation was a plate of crow and there was no face-saving way out for the South.

Yet again they were under the boot of self-righteous Northerners, never mind that the boot had been their favored tactic with an oppressed minority forever. And there was a face-saving way out and they rejected it and retrenched into racism and violence. Oh, well. 

Falwell was probably genuinely shocked to be treated like a hick and a dick, so he founded the Moral Majority, the righteous ass, and the rest is our history. The South has always been a separate entity, a debauched substate, and is now asserting itself in the crazy cause. 

The South is doing so by taking over the country. Read the writings of the racists, especially the Calhoun era stuff. Read the Confederate Constitution. Hell, read Jerry Falwell. It isn't hard to see it, once you look: the South has risen again and we are living in it. 

Welcome to Dixie, the voting base of Donald Trump, the sine qua no-Trump, his core of true believers and America's preeminent losers. And woe to someone if Trump turns on this base. His favorite attack appellation is "loser." They aren't going to like it if he turns it on them.