Perfidity Trap

America has slipped into a sinkhole of treachery and abuse under the auspices of conservative rule. Normal corrective mechanisms are being overwhelmed by interfering, self-serving, perverse, outside factors, rooted mostly in monied interests.

So the system keeps spiraling down. Fewer people are well-served by their institutions and wealth is increasingly, unconscionably concentrated at the top. Because of the interference the system can't alter course but continues on towards self-annihilation.

Pin-headed, Upside-down Fake: Enjoy!

Hard-working, responsible, community-minded Hispanics are being arrested in the name of our pin-headed president, Donald Trump. Such an instance occurred in Illinois and most of the local citizens, Trump voters, were indignant that Carlos had been detained. He had been caught twice driving drunk years ago but had then stopped drinking. Everyone interviewed liked and respected him. 

He manages a Mexican eatery. Several of the locals, however, said that Carlos was a law-breaker and--tough luck--that he must go. Those citizens have the mindset of pathetic, degraded, submissive subordinates (yes, master) everywhere and want to beat up on anyone they can. Trump is held to an inverted, sick standard of lying ineptitude and Republicans generally are held to no rational standard. 

It's part of the scam. Most of those interviewed were not mean. They had been duped by Trumpian rhetoric. But the bullying faction bore down at the the opportunity and they are now in charge. They were always assumed, at least by me, to be a fractional minority of Americans but they have been buoyed by the fake president, Trump. They are the worst of us. Save Carlos from Trump! 

Marxism/Bannonism

As most of us expected Trump clearly can't think his way out of a wet paper bag so we're left with a Jewish Islamaphobe and racist improbably named "Miller" and an Irish-Catholic autocrat, Steve Bannon, who wants to disempower the evil empire in Washington in favor of a more decentralized state, his dictatorship of the proletariat. 

The intervening steps are Stalinesque, however, with an American workforce turned into serfs by Bannon's party, which is incidentally also responsible for causing a revolutionary redistribution of wealth, unwittingly served by their savior, Bannon, who will decentralize everything in their favor just like Stalin and Mao and Lenin. Oh, right.

Too often the serf's-eye view of this (RIP) was from the bottom of a hole in the ground. Eggs must be broken, I guess. This casts the Putin connection in a different light. Bannon and Miller must be admirers. If Bannon's "deconstruction" looks like Lenin's and Mao's we are in for a ride. But the peasants are getting restless in Republican town halls. 

For the haters of political correctness I have a suggestion: tar and feathers for any right-winger or lumpen-aristocrat ducking the electorate and limiting voter involvement. Bannon looks feathery already and newly-hatched. We should practice on him. As one of the serfs he claims to serve I want to send a message to this arrogant misanthrope.

Let's Play "Pretend"

For all the bluster and "outsider" nonsense the Trump administration is tracking right back to core, conservative (pretense) doctrine, all observably false, such as small government (pretense) blather and promises of the impossible, that you can cut taxes and raise defense spending and (pretend) it will magically not produce deficits. It produces deficits and always has but it gives them an excuse (pretense) to try to screw voters out of everything, health care and Social Security and even civil rights. 

Government includes the military, someone should inform them, without pretense, but they like burning through our money on anything but us. Trump and his crew want a cataclysm of any kind (to act as a pretense). They already invent things. Let's pretend: "I inherited a mess." Right, Donald. Obama inherited two wars botched by Republicans and an economy destroyed by them through deregulation and a middle class on the ropes because conservative, corporate shills sent their jobs to China. 

Or, "Islam is after us." The Trumpists want a holy war more than anything, for varying scary reasons, all pretentious. They want free reign and they can't repeal the entire Constitution so they try to work within its constraints to produce a slow coup, revolution and devolution from democracy to something else--an inhuman, corporatized state with inconceivable disparities and injustice and no equal protection for anyone. Much of this is accomplished already. It is, all pretense aside, exactly what they want.

Showdown at the Town Hall Corral

My God, after decades of indoctrination to the contrary many Americans have gotten it into their heads that they deserve more than contempt and a wretched life with no security and an uncertain end.

The Republicans are stunned. Little people are standing up to them and expecting a return for their support instead of more and forever--yes, the core doctrine of the undead--tax cuts for the rich.

He stole the election...

and had no mandate and did whatever he wanted and wrecked everything he touched and left a trail of shame and horror and destruction. Bush was in all ways a precursor​ to Trump.

Feckless Endangerment

The interplay of ritualized malice and incompetence that characterizes Republicanism is hard to tease out because screwing things up deliberately looks a lot like incompetence. In reality, it's not, but only sabotage. It's a skill but a dubious one. Demolition is easy. 

They win no matter what. Did they mean to waste billions in Iraq getting innocent people killed and destabilizing the place, while the fat cats made money? Bush was reelected and there was no reckoning. "See, gov'ment sucks," they say. So they were rewarded.

If they accidentally or inadvertently hadn't messed it up they would have made hay anyway. This is cunning but not smart. All it requires is that you don't give a shit about outcomes. Maybe Steve Bannon could kill hundreds of thousands of people and not care. 

Probably, but Bush did that and not only didn't he care but we didn't care either. They mostly killed heathen and brown people, as it happened, and some dutiful Americans. Dead and injured Americans? What's the fuss? Their outlook is too vast for such stuff.

An otherworldly vision is theirs and in it creation is crud. They despise us, and probably themselves, and we vote for them. Whatever, but they should go. They are evil people, wanting to remake society according to their sick ideas, pessimism and hate.

Real Fake News: The Day in Trump

Donald Trump forgot he was president today in informal interactions with the press and others at the White House. He lambasted his own administration for its leaderless incompetence and wondered what it had come to when the head of the free world can't find his ass with both hands and has to defer to bickering hacks and subordinates to put out contradictory, illegal executive orders and incomprehensible press.

He also grabbed a young female visitor "by the pussy" and then told the Secret Service to "dispose of her" but issued a reprieve and had her kneel and kiss his ring but then he said the pope was a faggot who was out to destroy him. He also said that Melania was a closeted Catholic and that he had suddenly realized that Jews and Catholics were in control of his administration and were poisoning him. He ordered a test of all his food.

When Bannon and Miller appeared he wept and begged for mercy. He said that he was having a bad day because he wasn't "getting any" and asked them to get him some but no Catholics or Hebes, please. Just get him some bland, Protestant pussy and a nice lunch but make sure it was tested first and not by them. He thought he had encountered a Russian in the hallway, by the way, because he "talked funny" and ordered it investigated.

Donald, real fake news is when you actually make stuff up, not when someone says something you don't like or deigns to criticize you. Fake news looks a lot like the rubbish you put out. Have a nice news day!

Has He No Decency?

No, not a bit.

Son of a Preacher-Man

It isn't tenable to view Donald Trump as an aberration, hallucination, outlier, comical interlude, or intermission in the noble history of a democracy. We are prone to think this because of how it reflects on us--that we aren't the people we thought we were. But we aren't. Some percentage of us were, more or less, and at some point. I'll explain.

We are the Balkans. We are the Middle East. We are Northern Ireland or any other political area deeply and incurably destabilized by irreducible factionalism. Trump's real forebears and antecedents are Jerry Falwell, Jimmy Swaggart and other irrationalist, reactionary, lying, self-serving, misanthropic, hypocritical, bullshit-peddling hucksters.

These preacher-boys are representative of a retrograde, racist element--our equivalent of the Taliban. They are believers in authoritarian government with claims to religious sanction and a divine mandate for permanent hegemony which, when threatened and challenged, warrants an all-out war and the annihilation of the (usually imaginary) enemy.

It is the devil's work and pernicious. I am several times over an alien inhabitant of the South: a Yankee, a social-justice Catholic, middle-class, progressive and even Irish--a Midwesterner by birth but politically appropriate for Massachusetts. It took me decades to begin to comprehend the depth of the racial animus, resentment, and reactivity in the South. 

There's an individual corollary to systemic, structural racism--unconscious and imbedded and as toxic to personal moral development as institutional racism is to social progress. Before I arrived at this understanding I thought I had noticed similarities and creative parallels between Southern and Irish writing--between, maybe, Faulkner and Fitzgerald. 

Their traditions are rooted in the psychology of defeated and humiliated peoples. Blarney, yarn-spinning and improvisational story-telling are ends in themselves and survival skills. Raconteurs are historians of traditions and identity, not facts and time-lines. The respective religious traditions--racism and Irish Catholicism--had been outlawed and went underground.

Irish priests were saying masses in the ditches and in the South there was segregation, the Klan, and honkeys hanging niggers with impunity (now they shoot them). Southerners and Irish Catholics (think of Fox News) share a sophistication for reactionary invention. Normally people call it lying but for them it's dimly revealed, reassuring and a matter of identity.

It's also compensatory because the boys--and it's a boy thing--had their balls handed to them in front of their women-folk back in the day. Those Southern politicians and preachers--there is no distinction--are the custodians of a tradition of identification, persecution, denial, fatalism, defensiveness, romanticized racism and delusional aggression.

In their delusion--the system of lies they live by--they recapture the flag from the infidels and restore righteousness. Now, deputy Donald has recaptured that flag for pathetic, loser, white-boy authoritarians everywhere and he's got Jeff Sessions and other neo-Confederates with survivalist instincts on his side. They lord it over the unbelievers. Oh, the triumphalism!

Reason isn't the idea. It's a performance intended to influence voters through emotionalism and fear. It's a sick, alternative world and it's reflected in the chasm between our political parties--revival culture in the land of TED talks. The creative impulse and tradition, good things, have been coopted, as have we, and are being used in the service of evil.

Whores of Parliament

The Whoredom Caucus in Congress--the Kochsucker contingent--is pushing for the immediate and reckless repeal of Obamacare. This is the face of suicidal partisanship and depravity, pure and simple. No matter how many people might be hurt, the Democrats must never have a victory. The commonwealth and citizenry are incidental in their scheme.

Goodbye, Cool World

The thing is, I love the world. I love life and all its spectacular diversity and particularity and the whole continuum down to our inanimate environment, though I wonder lately if inanimate isn't up from where we are. I don't feel any contempt for life at all but only for us because we are now anti-life--sick and predatory and suicidal and failing in the simple responsibilities our lives and consciousness require.

The gifts of life weren't enough. Little has been asked of us in return for so much but we shamelessly want more. I truly hate to say it because I don't have anything against anybody apart from how they live but--look at Trump, a despicable example of humanity. He thinks he's beyond the rules and that he defines​ everything within his sphere and authority but it's devoid of truth, justice and decency. 

I don't condemn him but only what he does. He is our incarnation of evil, a manifestation of the distilled and concentrated worst of us--those who empowered and supported him, meaning all of us. Sadly we are all implicated because of our common franchise and flawed nature, now evident in that man who is not just flawed but the repository of all deficiency, our most deplorable nature fully realized.

His Vampire Diaries: Death, Taxes, and Trump

The discovery of a new and depraved low in common denominators is a thing worth noting. An assumed floor had been reached but--yuck--there's a basement with emoluments, an Uncle Fester and implements of torture. And it's a pernicious little Uncle Trump Fester without the charm and good nature of the prime-time version. 

This is not a nice, renovated space with a lab, mood lighting and a lava lamp but a bonafide creature infestation and dungeon of horrors with an old furnace and ages of soot and shit and corpses and probably bats and their guano and hideous stuff in the crevices. The habitat of Trumpism is a dark, toxic and threatening environment.

Donald and the money ghouls have been living there for ages. We didn't really see or understand them but our worlds are converging and it's on their terms. They are vampires. They want more than they are given in life and so they take it, other lives be damned. Donald most fears the light of a free press because it means exposure.

Yet Another Insult

We have some breaking budget news from the Republicans, who have squandered inconceivable amounts of money destabilizing the Middle East and getting people killed, while making tons of money for the big businesses that fund them. The Corporation for Public Broadcasting, a harmless entity, and other such institutions must go.

This has to be understood for what it is, a slap in the face and another in an long list of insults aimed at the Democrats. As budgets go it's a meaningless gesture but as gestures go it's a powerful reminder of Republican spitefulness, toxic partisanship and ethical depravity and a useful tactic in helping always keep the scrutiny from themselves.

Salivating Pirate Ryan

Democrats are worried about undue influence because Donald Trump only rubs elbows with rich people. I'm here to tell them to stop worrying. Stop worrying because you've already lost that one.

Allowing for occasional grandstanding to appease certain deranged religious and socially apocalyptic factions Donald has indicated with every appointment and edict that his is a rich person's show.

The only question is what he will do when different cliques of opportunists have competing interests but they are going to make and ass-load of money on our backs somehow as they always have done. 

It has only not been that way in a few glorious instances in history and we happened to witness one of them and understandably thought it was normal and got quaintly attached to having decent lives.

But the middle class is toast as is health care and Social Security and any hope of a sane distribution of income and pleasant retirement if the henchmen and their salivating pirate leader, Ryan, have their way.

Forget about a fair shake. Forget about conflicts of interest. Forget about anything other than increasing inequity and economic barbarism. Forget about it or it will only feel more terrible as it occurs.

De Facto Donald

Donald is a de facto kind of president--loser of the popular vote and winner by a system fiat or fluke. He's starving for a mandate. He could have somewhat legitimized​ himself by being respectful of that. But, no. This is as it was with his inheritance. He got it, you didn't. Too bad, fuck you and get out of the way.

Donald Defactates

Yesterday, in an amazing display of indecency, Donald Trump dishonored his office and defactated in front of a group of reporters and the world in an incoherent, undignified and impromptu press conference.

He was unerringly consistent and efficient in turning reputable facts into furry shit-balls with his rigorous and probably proprietary digestive agenda. Apart from impeachment Donald should be charged with obscenity.

Pipe-Dream Pivot

Donald is going to dance with the girls who brung him, Bannon and Miller. There will never be a pivot. Forget it. Get over it. Move on.

People Get Ready

I believe in a reckoning. I believe that there will be a reckoning and that Republican lies and incompetence will be exposed. But we have been implicated. 

Democrats haven't taken enough of a stand and offered enough of a story contradicting the Republicans. That needs to be done or it will be unclear what happened. 

It will be unclear that it was all Republican deceit and arrogance and incompetence and greed. We know what happened. We know who screwed everything up. 

It's time to make our case. Someday soon it will be too late and it won't matter anymore.

Over the Edge for Trump

Donald seems to need to blow off steam through intermittent aggressive outbursts. Are people playing into his hands by challenging him? I have had two known, close encounters with nut cases and in each instance I concluded that the only workable tactic was to get away from them.

I was an arbitrary presence. I had a role in an imaginary drama. They were delusional and everything was reinterpreted in relation to their delusion so it was complicity or nothing. But I concluded that if the circumstances had been otherwise challenging them would have been the best response.

How so? I can't claim authority but the model is Edward Murrow tackling Joe McCarthy. There wasn't enough leverage for me to drive my crazy people over the edge and I probably couldn't and I wasn't invested enough to try but look at what Murrow did to McCarthy. He used steady pressure.

With Trump we are all invested and the stakes are high and we can't pack our bags. Where would we go? What would we do? We can't get away from him and we have a responsibility. We must criticize and ridicule him non-stop and try to drive him over the edge. He will do the rest.

The Vapors

Donald's violent temper and lack of self-control lead him to instantly want to vaporize anyone in his way--his own personal nuclear option. Now, what happens with this idiot if the country is actually attacked and real, mass vaporizing is an option?

Embarrassingly Heartbreaking

It's embarrassingly heartbreaking when your dog dies, especially these days because dogs are turning out to be better people than people, unfailingly good sports and faithful until death.

Republican Melodrama

We could call this "tempting fate with Trump" but there's a broader concern, the Freudian melodrama of the American electorate and impatient regression not to the mean but into the ditch. There's no explaining this irrationality (sine qua...) other than by racism. It isn't growing-pains but a death wish. 

Conservatives don't want to wait for their reckoning until the end. In a collapse racial minorities will suffer more and the aggregate might be purified of their distasteful presence, incidentally validating everyone's existential insecurity by the principle of comparative disadvantage, the inverse of the law of "more better." 

They don't want for us to live together and they think that by disempowering minorities their civilization might be saved. Thus they, these lunatics, are liars and cowards, asserting that their beliefs are universal and divine but then that they depend on human enforcement. They must suspect that they made it all up.

Everything happens fatalistically anyway so nothing really matters. Most essentially they are taking a hell of a lot for granted and getting presumptuous with God, which is sinful as hell. Again, it means that they don't believe in anything at heart except that the world is irredeemably shit and they want to see this verified.

That's a lack of faith but there is a kind of sick belief imbedded in it--tacit assumptions about salvation, power and redemption--and that life in the ditch will be familiar and not streaming with their own corpses and nuclear waste. If they don't even care about this then it's nihilism and not only a failure of moral imagination.

This is your Brain on Trump

A friend told me that some of the patients in her therapy practice are spending entire sessions talking about Trump. This is irritating enough to anyone who cares about other people, since it is due to unnecessary roughness on Donald's part, but it's even more annoying that it would probably please him. He's happy for any attention he can get. 

Donald's Resorts

Donald resorts to threats and intimidation. He resorts to innuendo, insults and insinuations. He resorts to retribution and reprisals. These are Donald's resorts. 

He overreacts and resorts to it all in a normal give-and-take, in facing resistance to his own aggression. He hasn't yet been injured or really attacked, only thwarted.

I hate to think what he will do when he actually takes a hit.

President in a Panic

In a panic a person doesn't think when they should. When people choke they think when they shouldn't, overriding innate abilities and training. President Trump and team appear to be in a panic.

People suspect that he's not only failing to think but that he's incapable. He seems to be unable. And unstable. Some of those most alarmed are insiders and witnessing it in-person and up-close.

It's very worrying. We're one terror attack or natural disaster away from a highly dangerous situation. It's not the "terrorists" we need to worry about. It's our boy Donald and his surly underlings.

My Life in Review

I can't make sense of my life anymore. I have lived it in relation to social, political and personal values that are no longer viable or may never have been. My mistake, I guess, but I hate to think that everything that I was taught and believed about what mattered in the world was nonsense.

Come and Get It

What's that incredible clanging, you ask? Donald or someone is on the lawn at the White House trying to ring a big bell hard enough for it to be heard on Wall Street.

It's feeding time again for the financiers. Never before in the history of mankind has so much been paid by so many to so few for nothing. This is not our finest hour.

The Goths

The appeal of Gothic Architecture for the average smelly, unhealthy, economically insecure, inconsequential, bug-ridden serf from the Middle Ages is that their lives, though lived at arm's length or less from a gargoyle, are inferred to be part of a greater system which--if they could only step back far enough--would be seen to be as immensely beautiful as a cathedral. But they can't step back and they only get glimpses of God's majesty in everyday happiness and wonder, as in nature and in the miracles of observable creation.

We, however, get glimpses of God's majesty in Trump, or such is the implication, since the grandeur is all his now and he won and he's rich and he's reputed, by himself, to have other sizable, unverified assets and he is never wrong. Characteristically of its panderers this world-view offers us an inversion of reality, that the system is defined by its parts. The whole, if you step back far enough, is already flaming wreckage, with angst-inducing hopelessness and death and disorder, the products of modern-day Republicanism. 

They dress well. They say the right things--about faith and freedom and prosperity and patriotism but, man, how they gin up the fear and attack anyone at-will and preemptively and dominate the discourse and keep everyone under threat and maniacally, narrowly, myopically focused. And intent on the near term. Why? They have turned the macrocosm into carrion. Birds are feeding on it and us--we are its accessible stuff. Don't look at their failed economic and social policies and the results of forty years of fixed ideation.

Don't look at it or they will attack and neutralize you. All the wealth and grandeur is theirs and that of their elite owners and donors by dictate and divine right. And they are owned, as surely as those serfs, by anyone but God, meaning the super-wealthy and their unseen allies. It is what they believe in, articles of irreducible faith without religious investment because, again, any kind of accountability is anathema to them and for good reason. But we all die and they will be carrion too one day. They are, by now, grotesque.

The Lowest Common Denominator...

is Donald Trump. Well, no, maybe Steve Bannon. Evidently he is Trump's Rove and Cheney rolled into one. And here we thought we had seen the worst of it in Bush.

First in Fear

The only things I can think of that we excel at right now are fear and being armed to the teeth. Oh, and jailing people.

Very Scary

Donald Trump and Steve Bannon are dying for a terror attack against America. They are inviting a terror attack against us. They want a terror attack more than anything because it will justify everything they want to do. It wouldn't really, but in their minds.

I can imagine a scenario, honest to God, where they go militarily insane after such an attack and then rational, really patriotic Americans, such as Secret Service Agents with guns and access to the men, find themselves wondering if they should shoot them.

I can imagine it, which is already insane. Heaven help us if it actually happens. If I can imagine it they can which means that, in the event, there might be martial law and a dictatorial situation, where the agents are replaced with private security guys--yikes!

Donald Quixote

Donald is our new Quixote and I guess Steve Bannon is his Sancho Panza, though Bannon doesn't act as a foil and anchor to Trump but as an inciter to his insanity. Together they engage in imaginary battles of chivalry as the world looks on in confusion and horror. It would be pitiful and amusing if they weren't able to ruin lives at the stroke of a pen.

Bannon has indicated that he believes in a cyclical theory of history and society involving periodic remaking and rebirth through cataclysm. Now it appears that he thinks that Trump is its agent or harbinger and that he is its facilitator. This lunatic thinks he has some romantic, dramatic, charismatic role in human history and that they are men of destiny.

Donald in Yemen

Donald Trump got an American and a bunch of other people killed and blew up over $50M worth of our hardware in Yemen and it isn't real to him. Watch the video of his comments. 

I understood why Obama was more militarily aggressive than I wanted. Republicans will excoriate Democrats over defense at any opportunity and make them unelectable forever by being unfairly critical. It also distracts voters from their own criminally incompetent militarism. All the while they get rich by it, and by everything else, speaking of criminality. 

Obama cared and felt something human when he got somebody killed. Trump doesn't care. His magnificence can't be compromised by a stupid soldier who forgot to duck. Dying is for losers to Donald. Winners don't get killed. They get rich while other suckers get killed.

Bannon Alight

I know I said things were turning out worse than I thought possible with Trump because of his apparent reliance on a certain think-tank but it's even worse yet. Steve Bannon appears to be in charge. This guy is such a hideous thug.

For the first time I can imagine complete societal collapse and economic decline and chaos. Oh, but there are indications in his nutball past that this is his deliberate goal, to remake the country through fire and sword and such.

So, let's stab him and set him on fire and see how it goes. If he wants to put us through that it's only fair that we try it out on him first.

Points of Light?

You can easily see the hypocrisy and delusion of the crusading political right in their views on abortion. They want less government interference but for the government to regulate or abolish abortion. They want fewer abortions but spend their money trying to shove their values down other people's throats, not setting up institutions offering women safe, free environments in which to have their babies.

They want individual freedom but not for women in this instance. Their values dictate otherwise. They are simply in the wrong country and century or millennium. Their animus for Islam comes from this, that they accept the idea of theocracy but for their god--Islam is right in demanding a religious state but wrong with the religion. This is why nonsense and imagined threats like Sharia Law make them nuts.