United by Contempt

Geeky Libertarians and Fundamentalist Christians are strange associates until you think that both groups crave a world of purity--the geeks abstract, mathematical perfection and the bible-thumpers spiritual purity in unity with God. That is to say, death. In a way both groups despise life.

They despise matter and especially biological existence--because it's messy, mortal and flawed--so geeks with libertarian leanings find themselves voting with revanchist, delusional, literalist biblical outcasts seeking to restore an old, divine world order which never really existed. 

Or, similarly, the Confederacy. Contempt and feelings of superiority unite and define them. Bannon, Miller, McConnell and Ryan drip with it. Falwell did as well but now he's pure--or, rotting in the ground. The coalition is united by contempt. They hate themselves, their lives, and humanity. 

Climate Change Toupée

Lamar Smith, resounding idiot of Texas and climate denier, is taking the toupée approach to global warming, just as he did with his own head, and the results are bad. Yes, dumbass, you are bald and it's better to own it. And yes, dumbass, the planet is warming and it's better to own it. Away with the toupée.

Death to Paul Ryan

Never, ever would I kill someone. I don't own a gun. (NSA, are you there?) But, my God, how I wish that Paul Ryan would die. That smug smile, apparently present whenever he sees his life-long ambition of screwing his fellow citizens out of their lives and livelihood possibly to be realized, is unbearable. 

How Louche

Louche is now resplendence. Excess and tack are tasteful. Trumpism is triumphant. It's a degenerate age.

Desecration Days

Not much reverence and respect still adhered to the American State by the time of Trump but an aura of deluded idealism hung about the place, that we were still special and were still, in any case, identifiably American. Even that thin air of authenticity is now being dispelled daily by Trump. 

His actions seemed deliberately designed to desecrate his office, the government generally and the tattered remnants of our ideals, a flag still flying and shot to pieces but now wet with Trump (yuck) urine. If someone had been designed from the ground up for desecration you couldn't beat Donald.

Presidential Polygraph

Somebody, tell me what would happen if Trump were hooked up to a polygraph, and not that it would start smoking and then burst into flames.

I mean, seriously. He doesn't​ seem to know what telling the truth is. I don't know how you get a baseline on him. He's not a normal person.

Python for President

Clearly we misunderstood Trump's talk about the swamp. He was a Burmese Python putting out a warning for the 'gators. And the 'gators--life-long and well-loathed and rightfully-feared reptiles like Ryan--are finding out what a python is like. 

Oh, the Humanity!

At this point observations about the degradation of Trump voters will only be trite. The souls are already sold and can't be redeemed at the White House pawn shop. Even those of us who love diversity have been coerced into a false duality by those who believe blindly in dominance and submission. They succumb to the Republican push for depravity and mostly end up in submissive roles. The model is dehumanizing to everyone but they have won at the polls and are running everything. 

What that model isn't is Christianity, one of the wise traditions insisting that we must submit only to God and that anything else is idolatry. So it is that Trump voters will continue to take it up the ass for the team because indignity becomes them and independence, reason and accountability are outside of their scope of operation but maybe they can glimpse it in the afterlife, if justice is then dispensed. They have given up on decency and are disgraced voyeurs at the spectacles of Trump.

Out of the Shadows

Of all of the groups to come out of the shadows lately none has been more routinely maligned and misunderstood than pussy-grabbers and Trump isn't doing them any favors. It wasn't so much feminism that drove them underground as political correctness since real pussy-grabbers know how to execute the thing and seldom grab an unwilling target and they never, ever, brag about it later.

And, frankly, they don't use the word "pussy" but they won't tell you what they do use in the unlikely event that the reference is needed. Suffice it to say that Trump is reviled by them and anathema. They are honorable people with a long history and traditions and they absolutely love women which Trump clearly does not. So also in this instance Trump is an outcast, as he was in New York Society. 

There, in the higher echelons, a surprisingly large contingent are members of the club. If white supremacists can own their stuff then the grabbers (it's called impulsive fondling, more correctly) can certainly own theirs. But, most importantly, they want it known that Donald does not speak for them. They can now speak for themselves because of renewed tolerance and lowered standards.

For this they grudgingly thank Donald. And Roger Ailes. And Bill O'Reilly...

Pit Bull Radio

My sources tell me that Trump's tidal wave of misinformation will include radio talks called firesale chats patterned on Roosevelt's and meant to cement his place in our hearts with their intimacy, homespun imagery and earthy appeal, including anecdotes of racial animus and resentment. 

There will be exhortations and quasi-religious, inspirational material delivered in Donald's distinctive style which, if he realizes it is failing, will default to his attaching himself tenaciously to America's collective, psychological ass by his pit bull-like jaws of doom. We will never be free of him.

He will plague our minds and memories forever even if we manage to impeach him or if he dies. He looks as though he could die any day from over-stimulation and exasperation. He's always flush and intensely animated. Our assets have been sold cheap--old news--but the brand is now on the block.

It has been replaced with Trumpism and the firesale chats are ultimately about this, ensuring that Americans have once and forever forgotten what we formerly stood for. 

No Wall There

I keep telling friends of mine, earnest critics of Trump, that they're throwing stuff at a wall to see if it will stick and there's no wall there.

Donald Trump's Super Premium Presidency

There it is, by marketing decree, what Americans have longed for, manifestly excellent and exceptional! Trump's premium--a presidency for the ages!

What a shame it's not. That's what you get when you hire an actor and an advocate of branding. The presidency has been branded. What about us?

Unhinged

I'm envisioning a new interview or performance show featuring Republican politicians and called GOP Unhinged, patterned on MTV Unplugged and offering us a chance to assess our current leaders without all the trappings and over-produced aspects of the propaganda machines at Fox News and elsewhere. I bet we'll see just how crazy they really are. 

Maladaptive and Malicious Daydreaming

I hypothesize that maladaptive daydreaming is rampant and virulent and contagious among Republicans. The signs are rife. Read about it and tell me what you think but the loss of a sense of reality is a critical diagnostic criterion. That alone makes it plausible.

Fake President

Messages emerge from people's fixations, unconscious and accidental indicators of their failings. Donald's is authenticity, revealed by his obsession with fake news. From this we learn that he is a fake, struggling blindly to feel real. It isn't working. The man is a sham. 

Baby Seal Clubbers' Club

As Republicans cast about for innocents to slaughter the play of personalities is interesting to observe. In God's own court I think Donald Trump would be ruled non compos. But the smiles of Paul Ryan and Mitch McConnell​ are unforgettable as they consider the suffering and the harm they may cause. They kill people as surely as if they had shot them.

Children and old people were always first on their lists but with the rise of Trump the scope of their cruelty expands. Ryan and McConnell​ are the guys on whom you want to go medieval. Hang them above the city gates alive and in cages and let nature take its course. We didn't actually kill them--did we?--just as they never killed anyone themselves.

We Can't Afford Big Bird

Sadly, we can no longer afford Big Bird, our Republican overlords tell us. Such edicts arise from their gated communities. Occasionally I work in one of these, with the monstrous houses usually inhabited by an aging white person or two, and often only part-time. But we can't afford Big Bird, they tell us.

Who is This Trump Guy?

Donald is unknowable not because he's deep or complex but because there's nothing there. Trying to understand him is a waste of time. 

Observation makes sense. Analysis doesn't. He's already observably incoherent. Ridicule makes sense. Satirizing him makes sense. 

Criticism doesn't. There's nothing for the criticism to stick to. For the truth of Trump look at comedy. Look at farce. Look at Alec Baldwin. 

The SNL version is the truth of Trump. He isn't a kitschy president he is kitsch--gaudy, exaggerated, inauthentic and ephemeral. 

Dame Donald

Some day Donald will go to England and maybe meet the Queen. I think she should make him a dame. It feels right and it's more alliterative than if he were a sir.

The Carpet-Bombing of the Imbeciles

Let's not forget that Republicans had carpet-bombed their share of the electorate into imbeciles with lies long before Trump.

Let Trump be Trump

It was the irrefutable lesson of the campaign, that Donald was right and that he had the key to the electorate. He did it his way and he won. But it's one thing to run and another to rule.

Fresh Greed

It's Spring and the greed is in bloom everywhere and its leaves are fresh on the trees. The sap is rising in investors and there is no thought of Winter. And why not, since they have learned how to flee from the cold, vacationing on the funds they've hijacked from us.

Big Shorts

In investment language Donald Trump shorted the intelligence of the American voter and won. Voter stock went down. He continues to bet on idiocy but everything has a floor. He cashed out at the election and bet again on ignorance and gullibility. 

When will the electorate realize they've been duped? And will Donald get out at the bottom? He is simultaneously betting on an upside for selfishness, setting the stage for a new round of plundering and asset-stripping at the expense of responsible Americans.

It has been the Republican practice for decades to bet on wealth and against the poor and middle-class while gaming the system. Donald is in a position to influence, if not guarantee, the result but we still have some value, even at liquidation. We can vote.

No Worries!

Donald Trump, feeling compassion for the American people (he loves them like his children) and aware of their concerns, has created a cabinet-level department of reassurance and reinterpretation to be called No Worries! and chaired by Steve Bannon, a man of many hats. Bannon's code name in this role will be thatch, to keep it district and separate from his roles as advisor (code name: rasputinberry) and defense honcho (code name: flamingo).

Change is hard. Donald knows this but he also knows his own record and, disregarding the bankruptcies and calamities, it makes him confident. Keep in mind, however, that Trump lives large, especially now that he is lord of the universe, and that Bannon, a devotee of apocalyptic fantasies, thinks for the future. In other words, you may decline, suffer and die in the short term but, on-average and eventually, everything will work out well.

We have their word. Be reassured. And, no worries!

Trumphog Day

We are living the same day over and over with Trump, the dumbing-down of outrageous behavior into normalcy. Trump does this, Trump does that.

Meaning is reduced to decomposing, undifferentiated matter, to sameness and banality, initially molecular and then atomic in its incoherence. 

At the Trump Ranch: Ponderousness and a Brackish Bonanza

The Trump transition oozes on as an immense wall of slime, incorporating everything in its way and causing the death of differentiation, intelligibility and decency. Our unctuous, gelatinous executive is a marvel of absorptive capacity and habitual ingestion, feeding to no purpose and only from compulsion. 

In the incorporation there is no noticeable transfer of energy or increase in the organization and complexity of the brackish, rancid entity of Trump but only disappearance, the destruction of life and order for the sake of it and to reduce resistance for someone(thing) already too overfed to be affected.

Sometimes a Not-So-Great Notion (and Nation)

Congressional Republicans are some fixed-idea people, for sure. The most destructive social and economic policy ever, tax-cuts-for-the-rich, is enshrined in their souls and baked into their brains. It will be uttered on their death beds.

It will be carved on their tombstones. And they continue to tout it, that this miracle, snake-oil elixir will benefit everybody when, well--look at the figures on the increasing inequality of wealth and income instituted by them in the 1980's.

Fjord Foundation

I have learned that Donald Trump, being as perplexed as anyone by his own greatness and identifying with the pillaging peoples of the Middle Ages, is inventing an Aryan backstory for himself, that he is a true descendent of the great Scandinavian conquerors, a modern-day Viking. Tell me he doesn't look like one--ruddy, windswept and with a jutting jaw and airs of belligerence, restlessness and invincibility. 

Not wanting to take chances, though, with his immense, inherited wealth he has spun out a think-tank and corporation, the Fjord Foundation, to pursue these investigations on his behalf and return the results he requires. If there is no genetic connection to Norse marauders according to his DNA that information will be suppressed and something substituted proving his plundering roots and lineage.

The truth of Trumpism is this, that invention is everything and that reality is what powerful people deem it to be. Like any rational rich person Trump wants the rewards of risk without the actuality of it so the Fjord will be a hedge foundation, highly leveraged and an entirely new kind of entity, an organization invented for the purpose of speculation in ideas and the reverse-engineering of facts and information.

Trump's superiority is the starting point, an assumption and hypothesis, and the foundation will then scour the historical and scientific universes for corroborating evidence or it will be made up. The Fjord Foundation will operate on borrowed funds and is designed to implode if threatened with insolvency and to leave creditors holding the bag. Trump will move on, in command of his longship, to other conquests. 

Trump's 400

A list of 400 or more of Trump's lesser appointees so far shows that they aren't remotely what was promised in the days of his courting of disgruntled and supposedly disadvantaged and dispossessed white people. 

The list consists of crooks and misfits and slithery, selfish creatures and swamp denizens eying  their next meal. There are lobbyists, galore. Trumpist white voters are about to find out what dispossession really is.

Rosemary's Baby?

It is clear from his actions that Donald Trump might be a child of Satan. He must furnish his birth certificate and any other evidence that may contain clues and information about his origins and ongoing affiliation with the prince of darkness, Lucifer, and his allies. 

Also he must provide the same for his mother, especially any evidence that she was once known as "Rosemary" or evidence of her association with anyone by that name or evidence of surrogacy or the attendance at his birth of gaunt, bearded men in dark robes.

The Physics of Trump

Trumpian physics differs somewhat from Newton's and is based on the principles of seizure, inheritance and privilege. That is, it assumes energy subsidies and ongoing deference. The laws are as follows:

1. Trump, once placed in motion, will increase in motion.

2. For every action there is a disproportionate reaction.

3. Other entities, when met, will get out of Trump's way.

The Wrecking (Crew) Comes to Fruition

The dizzying disorder and ineptitude of the Trump administration can't be understood as ineptitude. It's demolition. They're clearing the ground for their new world order and sowing the seeds of confusion so that they can claim, as they already have begun, that good is bad and right is wrong and up is down. Welcome to chaos.

Bannon's Boy-Toy

Donald Trump is so far over his head in the presidency he appears to have become Steve Bannon's boy-toy.

The Camp of the Cowards

Steve Bannon has a known appetite for racist, apocalyptic literature (The Camp of the Saints) so I would recommend to him another such work, The Birth of the People's Republic of Antarctica by John Calvin Batchelor. Years ago I was working my way through this when I encountered a section so offensive to me I stopped reading. In it Catholics were a degraded, submissive subspecies ruled by Jesuits. 

Catholicism is also Bannon's tribe so he should read the book. He's too powerful now to care but I want to pit Bannon's racism against Batchelor's. Wait a minute, they're now both in the Trump camp, the camp of bullies, liars, lackeys and cowards. Isn't it the point? They romanticize barbarity because they feel invulnerable to it. They want it for us. And you wondered why their side loves their guns so much.

They are on the attack. Batchelor became a right-wing radio host so he's from Bannon's milieu. He poses as a serious, responsible Republican but anyone taking that seriously would have abandoned the party of Palin and Pat Robertson decades ago. The best outcome would be for all these racist people to get together and maim one another so that the decent, peaceful, sane remnant can rebuild the world.

 

Calvinists and Catholics are odd allies in the coward camp, armchair generals of the Armageddon. It shows, however, how extremes meet, some Catholics mistaking worldly, administrative authority for divinity and the Calvinists, schismatics forever, rejecting all authority and thereby becoming solipsists, reductivists and the arch-enemies of civilization. It's a tag-team from hell and where we are heading.

My Favorite Martinet

The spineless rigidity of the Gingrich and Cruz class of Republicans is illustrative of their inconsistency as seen in the tension between their fetishized, tribal take on individualism and freedom and their insistence on conformity, unanimity of purpose and total doctrinal adherence and agreement.

John Roberts voted once in a way they didn't like and--wham!--he was instantly accused of everything short of child molestation. But they lob their bombs from secure positions and leave real risk-taking to poor slobs and the sorry citizens whose franchise they gleefully reduce at every opportunity.

The competition for a favorite martinet--a representative, disciplinary automaton--is fierce. Gingrich is now a pathetic, preening, ridiculous and rotund third-base coach looking comical in his uniform. Tom DeLay is where? Grover Norquist is my choice. He cracks the whip over congressional Republicans.

They must obey his arbitrary and particular dictates absolutely and he never runs for office. He brags about removing Republicans who dare to refuse or resist him. There's independence and democracy, Republican style. Nobody knows who funds him. What a great gig for a starched white-boy.

A Well-Heeled Machine

Trump's administration is a well-heeled machine. 

Trump's Tomb

It's time to think ahead to Trump's tomb. This needs to be a magnificent structure, a mausoleum befitting his immense, incomprehensible greatness and a venue for reflection, remembrance, and evangelical prayer. He will have to have a presidential library -- a startling idea in itself for a person so unread and ignorant. It will make sense to combine with that. 

Immediately it's clear the location must be in the center of everything and be as obvious, unavoidable, and in-your-face as Trump so Bob Jones University and Patrick Henry College, backwaters springing to mind, should be ruled out. New York City is the only possible place, in a site as conspicuous as the Apple Store's, so I propose the site of the Apple Store.

That beautiful, transparent structure will be replaced with a windowless, granite monstrosity, perfectly symmetrical and impenetrable. All of the works will be below-grade, as with the Apple Store, suggesting the interiority (or nonexistence) of Trump's character and the nature of his administration, unconscious, arbitrary, authoritarian and compulsive. 

Boneless, Skinless and Chicken

God bless Nassim Taleb, author of The Black Swan, for trying to help us understand his difficult ideas but, of them, "skin in the game" makes instant sense. There's no incentive for anyone to behave with nothing at risk, except for moral courage, a quaint idea and now in short supply, particularly when outsize profits are available. 

Hedge-fund honchos and financiers are examples and now closely allied with politicians from both parties who are too dependent on their contributions to see straight. Those politicians are supposed to be looking out for all of us but they're too spineless, cowardly and compromised to do it. And they have no "skin" in the game.