Where Beagles Dare

Trump sees himself as a figure of high drama but it's all bathos. He's an idiot and an oaf and a loser and a buffoon. In this election the bathosphere beckons to all of America. We can make ourselves ridiculous. There will never be an equivalent of an opera or real drama for Trump, like Nixon in China. 

His would be a farce or a takeoff on a comic operetta with a theme, perhaps, of piracy, mistaken identity, adultery or impersonation. Picture Donald wailing away in full costume in a light comic opera. It's perfect. He's an actor in his own life, in search of an identity, or a character in search of an author.

He's asking us to give his life meaning and reality, as others always have for him, and he keeps-on because there's nothing inside and it's never enough. He's empty and wanting to be filled but there's nothing for it to adhere to. I am against granting his request. God help us and our nation if we do.

Roger's New House

I might feel bad if I liked Roger Ailes's new, $36,000,000 mansion but it's almost as ugly as he is. Like any good, country-destroying titan, though, he has multiple residences. I hope the others are as bad. Life as a lascivious, mercenary pig should only be so well rewarded.

David Brooks

David Brooks's latest article on the election is so laced with superiority and condescension it's hard to read, especially since he himself is representative of the decline he goes on about but the Times is culpable as well. Why the hell do they continue to employ him?

They must have a lower bar for conservatives. Most of their modestly lefty writers are uninspiring but at least the people make sense. I guess conservatives continue to be coddled because, well, lefties are nice and inclusive and more broad-minded and accepting.

And, to the extent that they can, the righties ensure that those who disagree with them pay any price they can exact. They are mean and damn the rules and they will bestow the pariah brand of persecution on anyone. Hillary is in another universe in relation to Trump.

It's "false equivalency" to even compare them. Where the fuck do you stand, David? He doesn't "stand" anywhere because he would have to admit to decades of his own arrogance and documented poor judgment, including his implication in the rise of Herr Donald. 

Though it's still not saying much, whatever he might do at this point since we're so deep in the crap he helped create, which I will not allow him to forget, not that anyone pays any attention to me. They would, however, if I was employed by the Times. Hint, hint...

That Devil Donald

No rational person thinks that they are master of their own destiny without the distortion of shrinking their perspective in time and space. No one is all-powerful and immortal. Someone can have mastery within a defined sphere over a limited period of time. In a democratic society individual self-mastery is assumed, in equality before the law, voting rights and other precepts. The autonomy of the state is an extension of individual autonomy, reflecting the will of the aggregate majority. 

Our state should, if it's functioning properly, be an example of the "wisdom of crowds."

Social dominance, whether voluntary or not, is undemocratic. It matters and it doesn't that petty tyrants have their henchmen and brownshirts, willing subservients, and that these underlings forcefully subjugate other people, because the result is the same and it's unclear where choice and dominance and submission begin and end. A brownshirt may be "compelled" to abdicate their freedom by odd, internal workings and a libertarian may be similarly a conformist and less than free. 

Mastery can occur naturally, through voluntary, conventional and circumstantial or circumscribed submission, or be a matter of aggression and dominance. My reading of our tradition is that a person willingly submits to an impersonal mastery, to God and other recognized structures of accepted wisdom and appropriateness, and thereby gains personal mastery, freedom, within limits. Those who opt for interpersonal dominance and submission lose personal mastery and independence.

They lose it on both ends of the equation. There are many archetypes and examples of this but the obvious one is the devil, whose pride and lust for power result in enslavement and compulsion and who exacts the same from his adherents. Enter Donald Trump, whose pride and lust for power enslave him and result in the same for his followers, a loss of individuality and autonomy to a sick will, a failure and retreat on both sides. Their movement is a good example of the banality of evil.

People expect that souls are bought and sold in situations of high drama but, no. It can happen easily and incrementally and imperceptibly both individually and in societies as a whole. It is happening with Donald Trump in as banal a mess as can be imagined. On multiple fronts the unthinkable is becoming defensible, acceptable, commonplace and even trite, and all of it in a country priding itself on its religious principles, exceptionalism and moral superiority.

Good Intentions...

are a good place to start.

Malware

Trump's political machine is electoral malware and Trump himself is the ark of the code underlying it. They have hacked the system and are stealing and destroying it.

For the Welfare of All

Whatever happened to the ideas of public good and social welfare, that the overall level of societal well-being is worth looking after?

ignorance is this

--another possible name for the Trump Tour and his political movement.

Huevos Trumpos

If Trump should lose I'm sure he will go back to Mar-a-Lago and lick his wounds, or have someone lick them for him. But how can a culture process such a trauma? Denial, I fear, will be the answer on both sides, reflecting the incredible, Republican-induced polarization and militarization of our politics.

Trump's supporters are already in denial, thinking that he is in any way appropriate for public office, let alone in an important role. The other side will breathe too big a sigh of relief and carry on as though it isn't an ongoing emergency--but it is. One shell will have whistled over our heads.

But the Bismarck of political battleships is just offshore. I will own that the specter of Trumpism is too much to handle head-on. I can't. So it must be approached obliquely and tangentially, through all the small ways in which a society encounters various things, like having a brew named after you.

"Trump Lager" would work. And I am ready to recommend that my favorite Mexican restaurant begin to serve Heuvos Trumpos. I'll send the recipe and a sample down to Mar-a-Lago. Somehow we have to begin to understand the unbelievable insanity of Trumpism, not that I would drink his beer. 

I wouldn't touch anything with a hint of him on it but that's the point, to be compelled to remember, in subtle ways, that the forces supporting him aren't going anywhere. This ugly aspect of the movement will have to be addressed and comprehended and countered or we will pay down the road.

And it will have to be done while their battleship, with or without Captain Trump and his mates, is shelling the hell out of us because that is their idea of appropriate behavior in a democracy. Just thank God your name isn't Obamacare. That would be a terrible target to have on your back.

"Whackjob"

Trump has me wondering if there are good equivalents to "whack-job" in other languages. It could turn out be an important point in international relations, if he is elected.

Entertainment Ethic

The need to be constantly entertained and amused doesn't constitute an ethic.

No Anonymous

I find that people--Americans--are decent when their name is attached to something and jerks when it's not. So I say we get rid of anonymity, even in voting. If someone is going to vote for an idiot like Trump it should be on the record.

Suicide by Trump

America has a bonafide national death wish and you can see the means in action tonight in the first presidential debate.

Wag-Tailing

Inversion is a really bad sign, when good is bad and bad is good and nothing works authentically and as it should.

The Goldfinger crowd, the power-hungry psychopaths, love disorder and confusion because then they can take over.

They see it as an opportunity and so they sow the seeds of discord everywhere, sitting back to watch them sprout.

They sit back and say they're not involved and not responsible or aware and only watching in wonder as it all falls apart.

Then they stealthily step in, the sick, selfish dicks. Sound like anyone you know? Only the entire Republican ruling elite.

The Second Stooge

My theory is that a culture can only survive three stooges. The third is the herald of doom. Bush was clearly a stooge. Was he the first? Notice I didn't have to specify which Bush.

Trump is a tough call. Bush himself embraced his stoogehood to such an extent he seemed to be his own agent. Trump is in that camp and by all appearances self-regulating.

But he's a stooge at a high level, like Bush, having fully internalized his stoogedom, an avatar and ethical embodiment of the spirit of Gordon Gekko and blind, compulsive greed.

He has no identity or personhood independently of his money. As distressing as Trump is he's only our second stooge and so we still have some time. But what if I missed one? 

A Lesson From Greece

One lesson from Greece is not to be dependent on something that is out of your control. Greece can't control its own currency, because it doesn't have one, so all of those correcting mechanisms aren't available.

In America one political party has successfully marketed an economic perpetual motion machine. The machine lives on subsidies from anywhere--lots from other countries--for short-term, self-serving and political ends.

It can't go on. 

We need to look at the long-term and see to our infrastructure and productive capacity and look less at bogus threats like Islam and Sharia Law and other fake adversaries. Nobody can take us down but ourselves. 

Taking Care of Business

Republicans have only one real precept and that is to take care of big business and themselves. And if they aren't already they all aspire to be on corporate dole.

The Spirit World

I am calling on the spirit world to intervene in the fight against Trump. God knows, they must have a bigger perspective. 

They must know a whack-job when they see one.

Hillary Preaches to the Choir

How much more of a message do we need than the rise of Trump for his opponents to realize that Americans hate their spiel? It sounds whining, divisive and self-righteous. 

And the Democrats, notably Hillary, keep on and on and on with the same horrible stuff. I blame the white women. They fell in love with their mindless, gender-based superiority.

But they think that they are immune to criticism for the same reason, that they're above it and exempt. You lost me, girls, when you voted for Bush in '04. Look at yourselves.

You are the problem.

We Are Due

I think I know why Trump and his followers hate Hispanics. The Hispanics are a standing insult to the privilege of American white people who have been given so much.

And still they think they are due. We are due, alright, but for a huge reversal of fortune and comeuppance. May I live to see it. 

Can This Really be Happening?

Trump, I mean.

Scalability

One of my criteria for evaluating anything is scalability. For example, the average business mogul isn't scalable.

A society completely made up of people of that type and temper would be unlivable. They always have to win.

I think that I am scalable. A society full of me would look like Scandinavia, with everyone living closer to the mean.

There would be lots of differentiation but also a lot of social unity and community and tremendous public works.

I love public works: parks and museums and gardens and opera houses and trains and health care for everyone.

Writing this I'm convincing myself that I'm a pretty good guy. But most of our current leaders aren't good people.

They scale into a dystopian nightmare and I think that's where we're heading.

Is Our Wall on Layaway?

I'm reassured knowing that there are established patterns among people with similar psychologies. So it's already trite to say that Trump is a black hole of narcissism and that he has a daddy problem. Extreme narcissism results in paranoia, or so it is thought.

Paranoia is existential fear, embodied in projection to try to give the fear a focus. Recall, almost all of Trump's relationships are with subservients. If there's any question of who's on top he tries to turn the tables as he did with the voters, telling them that they need him.

When in reality he needs them. Donald needs all the adulation because he doesn't get it from himself, I guess. He must not like himself. Anyway, the scary thing is that Trump sees the entire world in Trumpian, projective terms, a horrifying attribute for a world leader. 

And his fragile psyche craves control. His propensity to attack anyone who challenges him, and some people gratuitously, is not a sign of strength, it should go without saying. It's a sign of feelings of weakness and inadequacy, probably from an unconscious father fixation. 

We saw in Mexico what Trump is really made of. All that bravado and then he's meek as hell in Mexico. Where's the deposit on our wall? Is it on layaway yet?  He didn't demand a down-payment so he is either a coward or a showboat, not a good thing in either case.

Donald saw Mexico as his own menacing, insecure, prurient self. Luckily for him they aren't that way or he might not have made it back. His cowardice there was instructive and characteristic of bullies and cranks. They only lash out when they think they're invulnerable.

Death by a Thousand Tax Cuts

Tax cuts for the rich don't help anybody. They are horrible social and economic policy, transfer-payments to truants from productive citizens. If more money is kept further down in the system it stimulates demand through spending and increases incentives to work.

Higher marginal tax rates also encourage wealthy people to put and keep money where it has social benefits, certain forms of investment and charitable giving. Anything, other than to take it as income. Bravo, Republicans, for your fixation on a disastrous economic precept.

Rielle Trump

I can totally understand John Edwards going for Rielle Hunter. He got sexual gratification and self-recrimination at the same time--or, if you prefer, indulgence and the guilt and shame associated with it, as Trump voters must get with him. 

They get to say "screw you" to the rest of the country and wallow in the degradation of it at the same time by choosing someone so obviously unworthy. It makes the rebuke to their fellow citizens stronger and preempts the inevitable reckoning.  

It preempts the reckoning on their culpability for the consequences, which they carelessly own, but leaves the consequences themselves to us. I expect more will come in the way of the Bush tax cuts: vile and nearly impossible to get rid of.

What kind of lunatic would Trump appoint to the Supreme Court? At least we know Trump is crazy going in. With Bush it was thought that he was relatively harmless and that we, the country, would just be a big-ass version of the Texas Rangers.

But look at what happened, a lasting legacy of pain. Countries are not playthings to be purchased to occupy wayward sons. But thank your stars you weren't born an Iraqi. The neocons would have had it out for you. The economy is another thing.

It was selectively and systematically trashed. The rich get richer with such predictability it's hard to imagine that it will ever end. How concentrated can the wealth get? A continuation of that, more than anything else, is the expected Trumpian legacy.

Nothing is Written

The culture-war in America is real but it isn't a war within a semi-unified entity to redefine the terms of its existence, given prescribed and accepted standards because changing circumstances require it, but a war between cultures, one within the bounds of legitimate authority and one not.

Democrats and progressives are the loyal citizens, ideologically descended from the thinkers of the Enlightenment, to whom the country is indebted for its founding principles. The nation's creators drew on those ideals. But the right-wingers are like the Arab fighters in Lawrence of Arabia. 

Everything is "written" in their world, predestined and ordained, and so people are not free but only implements of a higher causality, actors in a script written by God and so the thing has meaning at that scale but in earthly, fatalistic form it is normal for it to be violent, arbitrary and unintelligible.

To me it is to say that we are nothing but animals and not endowed individually with autonomous souls but enslaved to other forces. We are agents of a destiny entirely out of our hands and accountable only as players in a primal drama--to be judged by our allegiances, not independently. 

There are problems with dignity and self-determination in this human version of the Call of the Wild, a desire for the loss of individuality and submergence in a sea of unreason and conformity and the comfort of the clan or tribe. Okay, but that is not our tradition and calling. And nothing is written.

Expressly to Protect

Our system of government is designed expressly to protect us from the kind of insanity we are now witnessing with Trump. Where did it go wrong? The problem is not in our stars, it is in ourselves.

America on Koch

He may not have been their favored candidate but the Koch boys can't complain about Trump. For decades the Kochs and their allies have been conditioning America for just such a debacle and now a hefty share of the electorate is not only unable to discern the truth but they are instinctively drawn to falsehood, as long as the falsehood has an appropriate element of bigotry.

Their movement massively overreacted to the 1960's as though it was a prison riot. They never succeeded in redefining that innocent exuberance as a riot but they have sure succeeded with the prison part. Their prisoner voters have been complicit, choosing the womb-like confines of Koch-world, not understanding that it's impossible to withdraw and be a spectator and look out.

We are out, always participating in life and shaping it in our likenesses, wittingly or otherwise.

Wittingly is better. It means responsibility and the ownership of our independence. This is called "freedom" and the Kochs shouldn't throw that word around so much. Their minions have opted out of it for the false security of a prison of comforting delusion, determinism and tribal togetherness. We are all winding up within the walls, although as administrators, wardens and caretakers.

We babysit the inmates and pay their bills and try to keep them from harming themselves and us. Rational people see that it is a poisonous, parallel world. Trump shows us, however, how viable the delusion is. What do the Kochs really think, I wonder? They don't care about anything but themselves. Their sworn and self-serving testimony is that the nicotine of their ideas is not addicting.

But their ideological children are all smokers and having horrible health effects as a result. Boo-hoo, boys. Good luck getting them off of it. The kids are terribly hooked and not only on a specific set of lies, as the Kochs had hoped, but on lying, denial and delusion in general, not so much because more is merrier but because there is always increasingly shameful stuff to flee from and deny.

Super-Loser

Whatever happens with Trump he's already a super-loser. Figuratively his kids are already wiping his ass. What will he shit on next? Oh, that would be us.

Take it Away

The Great Reckoning could happen in slow motion but I think it will come. There was always a problem with politicians to get them to safeguard our society and principles but especially if it required doing something unpopular. 

And those were the good times, when politicians weren't openly for sale to special interests and cozying up to the idea of the Second Coming. The boomers have burned through their inheritance and are now borrowing from their kids.

They won't invest in anything for the public good, an idea which they increasingly refuse to recognize even though they have benefitted from it immensely. An earlier generation built the country. Drive through one of those gated communities.

Oh, I'm sorry, you can't. But there you would see those irresponsible children wasting our inheritance. Behold the huge houses and all the white people playing golf. The consumption seen there is unconscionable and unsustainable.

The amount spent maintaining even one of those houses could make a difference in a public school. It's time to take it away from them. It was easy money, anyway, a gift from earlier generations of Americans who were responsible and productive.

It's for their own good, to begin with. They can't be trusted to behave like adults. And it's morally right and it might save our asses as well.

Shit Values Voters

I perused Matt Bevin's remarkable story after hearing about some of the insane, treasonous, threatening comments he made at a perversely named summit of maniacal, evangelical religious fanatics. Evidently Hillary is the antichrist in intellectual, hausfrau guise.

She looks in fact like a Midwestern hausfrau but the values voters see a demon. I once spoke with someone who was in the Middle East after 9/11 but before Bush blew it up. They said they would be having a normal, rational talk with a western-educated professional.

Wham. Whoa! When 9/11 came up it was as though you had pushed a crazy button. Suddenly the doctor or engineer was foaming: it was all a plot and the buildings were brought down by explosives. Or, it looked like a disaster movie and none of those are real, right?

There you have Matt Bevin, foaming about Hillary Clinton as though he's in Cairo. Evangelical voters have to have demons because they are demons. They choose to live in that world and the belief makes it true. They don't give a shit about Jesus and the Constitution.

Hillary really rings Matt's bells. The message for America is this: it is over. We are doomed. We will be like the Middle East, incapable of rational government because rich people and religious fanatics control everything. Matt's personal story is amazing. He is accomplished.

But he's completely out of his mind. And maybe those Middle Easterners weren't. They saw the demons in Bush/Cheney and the neocons and the drive for global hegemony. They were right to be scared, considering what the neocons did. We are naive not to be more so.

Requiem for a Lightweight

No matter what happens with Trump he will never be anything but a lightweight and the game is already over. If he became a Trappist monk I would be glad that he was out of circulation.

But even monkhood would be corrupted by his inauthenticity. I can see that only death will set him free. No one with any sense of self-worth would struggle and strive the way he does to prove it.

Hence the requiem. It is over for Trump no matter what he wins or who he marries or what he buys or how much attention he gets. He's a sorry excuse for a human being and we are sorry too.

We are disgraced by our complicity in his candidacy and even the remote possibility of a Trumpian presidency is a dishonor of cosmic and celestial magnitude. We ought to be more ashamed.

We certainly ought to be more up-in-arms and indignant and scared.

Uterotubed

What is this fixation and preoccupation of the right-wing white-boys with uteruses? My theory is this: the human mind is profound and in its depths there is archetypal material, including primal and impersonal and collective "memories" of a sort having to do with life in the womb.

I think that the conservative nut-jobs had bad experiences there, in the womb, and so the impersonal, archetypal material is tainted. Maybe their mothers ate or drank something bad and it affected them. When you look at George Bush and Scott Walker and Sean Hannity you see it. 

There's that look in the eyes. Paul Ryan may have a hint of it. Nothing against their mothers, but it's the look you get with fetal alcohol syndrome. An excess of orange juice may have caused acid conditions in the uterus--hell, I don't know--but that blankness is there in the eyes.

That and the lack of comprehension.

No one would care if they weren't all resentful assholes with persecutory whims. So I think that the right-wingers have had their psyches and outlooks poisoned by some trauma in utero, whatever that may have been, and that they are unconsciously trying to get even with the world. 

And it's why they have the utero-fixation.

That is why Scotty and George and Sean and Paul don't have consciences and go around destroying things and hurting people and leaving inconceivable messes behind them for someone else to clean up, a show of indifference and contempt and an attitude of superiority.

Unnatural Selection

Looking at the leaders Republicans are coughing up, culminating in Trump, someone has to notice that they are selecting for sociopathy. The sociopathy trumps all other traits but the incompetence is also remarkable. It could be that they are not so incompetent but merely pursuing unintelligible ends, as a sociopath would do, like societal disorder and injustice.

All the evidence indicates that only a small minority are in on the plot, an incredibly wealthy cabal interested only in that old bugaboo, world domination. The traditional myths, such as the biblical ones, are so hackneyed and distorted they are no longer useful but newer ones come to mind, such as the James Bond stories. You wonder, who is Doctor No? Odd Job?

Who is Goldfinger, coldly saying to Hillary, our Bondess, I guess, "I expect you to die." She's no Ursula Andress but you work with what you have. The evil goals need to be accomplished by duress and deceit, clearly, or they wouldn't spend billions but simply market themselves as villains. We are told we are voting for freedom and fairness and constitutional aims.

It's obviously the opposite but the marketing is pervasive and cunning. My God, it must be nice not to have a conscience. What a simple world. They kill hundreds of thousands and never look back. They call themselves Christians and actively line their pockets with the lunch money of little kids. They dress nicely and maintain a air of sobriety and superiority.

We're the sober and skeptical ones, forced into it by living among the castoffs and throwaways, the people and ideals that once defined us. By the way, Newt Gingrich gets my vote for Odd Job but if the consensus of opinion is for Karl Rove I will go with that. 

Hecho in America

I wish I could buy more things hecho in America.

Be Here Whenever

I believe in creative procrastination and comparative advantage and the law of "more better" as ways of making decisions, of weighing things in non-linear fashion and going forward when the multi-dimensional scales tip in favor of something. 

That may sound fuzzy. I see it, looking back at what I just wrote. So let's take an example, your typical barking-mad, Republican ideologue thinking that surely only good things can happen if we invade some flaming shit-hole like Iraq. 

Oh my God. I realize now that by their standards only good things did happen: the price of oil has collapsed, we're in it ass-deep with the Israelis and the military subcontractors and peddlers of war matériel are making a killing, so to speak.

Hear me, I am not accusing Republicans of deliberately getting hundreds of thousands of people killed, including thousands of Americans, but only of not caring. This is an example of linear, static thinking used in a complex and dynamic situation. 

They shouldn't have acted, irrespective of their aims, especially since the same catastrophically bad decision-making that applied to starting the war was also applied in its execution, resulting from problems of perspective and moral incapacity.

Anyway, I didn't set out to find fault with those blindly ignorant murderers and incompetents but to illustrate the importance of using appropriate methods to make decisions in difficult situations, firstly by recognizing the complexity of everything.

Secondly it is helpful to learn from your mistakes, as part of acknowledging and owning complexity. Think of all of the inventors of the Iraq war, now shamelessly pretending they didn't fuck-up or even defending what is obviously a fiasco.

There I go again, though it's their fiasco. It's an important lesson for us, if not them, in the importance of approaching problems in fitting and productive ways, that is, in not having your head up your ass. 

Counteroffer

My counteroffer to Donald Trump and the Republicans on his bid for the presidency is "no." Donald, negotiate that. You are unfit for any role in government whatsoever. 

Go somewhere far away and pretend you are a big man. Buy yourself an island, lest you fall behind your fellow lords of whatever. Every real mogul has to have an island.

You can buy one of those naked statues of yourself that were so popular and put it at the dock or heliport to greet your guests. The image is, unfortunately, unforgettable.

Show on Safari

Trump's entire life has been an artificial exercise in predation. The boy really thinks he's a great white hunter but daddy paid for it and made it a safe experience. I wouldn't say he's shooting buffalo from a railway car but pretty close.

He's on a horse but if he falls off he will be instantly airlifted out. Uh, oh. Donald just shot one of the wardens. That guy is getting a little on-site triage. I hope he survives. Donald's assistants are reassuring him after the upset and kerfuffle.

Bwana Trump, in a portrait back at the manse:

Trump in the Rough

Donald Trump is in the rough but I wouldn't count him out. He's a cheater. He will do anything to win and so anything could happen:

Smell Test

In his book, Blink, Malcolm Gladwell showed how the smell test has validity. There are ways of appraisal originating more deeply than the levels of conscious judgment, investigation and rational analysis. 

These means must be respected, especially with such as Trump, who fails the smell test flagrantly,  like some kind of carrion, as did fisher-woman and moose-slayer Sarah Palin. Where did these people come from?

Don't they have noses there?

The Electrifying Conclusion

The American Right has some serious impedance. They are obstructive and resistant. And they have some amps. They are resistant and juiced. They know how to kick ass.

They are blockers and tacklers at the same time. Damn, it's a shame they're on the wrong side. I wish that they would at least play by the rules.

Question of Authority

Republicans have problems with authority. Societies are about submitting to higher ideals. Republicans and Libertarians want to be their own law without the constraints of respecting social rights. 

"Freedom" is just another word for what they want to do, the will to power and frontier, jungle justice. But the jungle ways never affect them adversely because they are the higher-echelon eaters. 

They have the upper hand. But, you know, that could change.

Jerks Abide

Assholes abide. Assholes have staying power. They are vermin and they will outlive all of us. The trick is to keep them in the crevices and under the rocks, where they belong.

Then the real dudes can have decent lives unafflicted be the infestation of anti-rationalists, the inhuman throng of true believers in the ancient ways of aggression and dirty-dealing.

God save us from Trump Lebowski! It's all a mistake. We're not who they think we are. Shit, the rug!

The Last Amendment

The Constitution of the United States needs to have a kill switch or an ejection seat or a self-preservation function, not to get the people away from it but the other way around.

Everyone says that the young people aren't racists and birthers and climate-deniers and religious fanatics so there's hope that they may rediscover America and save our ways.

As of now the wonderful dream of America is ending, at the hands of a privileged class of people who want a lockdown, an end to freedom, opportunity, social mobility and fairness.

They want to stay on top forever, in their lives and through their descendants, irrespective of how unworthy they are, in a class culture and empire, the opposite of the intent.

They are not originalists but aborigines, living a hallucination which they see as competition but they are playing off the system and refusing to live by the rules, that is, cheating.

It's no wonder they want Trump.

Bimbo Jesus Mentor

Paula White is Trump's bimbo Jesus mentor. She must be another Carnival Christian or she would have no truck with him. I suppose she will be our nation's pastor if Trump is elected.

She will pray with him in the White House while holding his hand. And they will be on their knees, I expect, or at least she will be. The future shepherd of our national flock, sans staff:

Who's a Whore

The possibility that Melania was a whore raises interesting points because America now abides according to the ethics of whoredom. Americans will do anything for money and once somebody Is rich nobody cares how they got there.

It's its own justification. I had wondered if the space-aliens, when they arrived, would think that our planet was inhabited by cars and that people were invented to serve them but it's all about cash. Americans are enslaved by greed.

Trump is representative, a man who is his money. So, Bravo!, Melania. She did what she had to do to get by, eventually marrying a rich buffoon. It makes me like her more, if she's a whore, a little bit of honest ambition in an ocean of lies.

Buy My Stuff

Donald Trump is such a prolific narcissist it causes all kinds of associative stuff to fire off in my head, from P. T. Barnum to big-time wrestling and some characters out of Mark Twain. But it's hard to get a handle on it and I resent having him thrust on us by an imbecilic Republican electorate.

He shouldn't have any responsible role in a situation requiring taking care of anyone. Anyway, the latest resonance for me is with Ron Popeil, the master salesman who makes you want to buy stuff you don't want, not for using or having or the pleasure of buying but to please Ron, I guess.

Or it could be for dramatic propriety and theatrical aplomb, wanting him to have a happy ending, if you know what I mean. Showing up at his venue is trouble. It sucks you in. We didn't show up at Trump's show he got shoved at us. Voters want to fulfill his wishes and give him a happy ending. 

Trump has the ability to get people to want to not disappoint him in his childlike selfishness and sociopathy. And he's insatiabile. What a mess. It will be anything but a happy ending with Trump, but rather a theatrical catastrophe. He's a spoiled baby and needs to experience some frustration. 

Jerry and the Race-Baiters

It's my understanding that race-baiting can be objective or subjective. Race can be used as bait or a race can be baited. Fundamentalist Christians are so practiced at it they do both simultaneously. There are layers to the thing and it's not ironic or unsubtle.

Take Jerry Falwell, Jr. He's salvation-central, a self-proclaimed witness for Christ and a whole-hog, racist honkey. Falwell would have everyone believe it's about standards and especially social order. Black people are associated with social disorder.

This is the pattern: these guys insist on control, muscle it through and get their way and then take no responsibility. Look at segregation and the resulting mess. Picture a ceiling-less, circular room with many doors and a test subject--say, a nigger--dropped inside. 

The room is a ghetto and not a nice place.

All the doors are locked except for the one marked "crack den." The test subject eventually walks through that door, trying to get out. Jerry screams "aha" and shows everybody and says look what the nigger did, he will bring us to ruin. People, check the other doors. 

They were all locked, including the one marked "decent, non-humiliating job."

The Falwell crowd is responsible for a lot of bad stuff and they blame it on everyone else. They believe in authority and that it must be God's authority and that they alone are His chosen representatives on earth. But I say to judge them by their standard.

You tell the tree from the fruit.

They have the hideous fruit of death and destruction and they're unaware of it. It's unconscious and savant-like, the result of decades and generations of indoctrination and the inbreeding of attitudes and associations. This shit will take us down.