Exit Hope

Another worthless Trump enabler, Hope Hicks, has bitten the dust. May she bite more dust after she leaves the White House and her stint helping end the world as we know it. Fat chance. She will enjoy the usual rewards. 

Degraded Republicans who show a willingness to toe the party line and lie and cheat and steal will be well cared for by the people they serve and it all comes out of our pockets. Where do all these terrible people come from?

High Anxiety

Always anxious to ensure that more Americans are utterly screwed a group of Republican operatives, now representing the administrations of twenty state governments, are suing to have Obamacare declared unconstitutional. 

Democrats need to understand what is going on here. 

Republicans will continue to attack until Democrats are completely disenfranchised. Democrats are the new black underclass in the hearts of a Republican political machine increasingly representing the values of the Confederacy.

Racism not only survives in America. As a political force it animates everything.

Persecutory Mania

I am officially declaring an outbreak of contagious, virulent, persecutory mania. Fear, anger and a desire for retribution put Donald Trump in office. Trump stokes these and similar forces out of instincts for inculturated meanness and depravity. A bandwagon effect then kicks in, causing the same factors to increase out of opportunism. Mean-spirited, insecure, bigoted individuals find their worst, persecutory fixations validated and normalized.

It is a religion of hatred rooted in a need for self-righteousness, ethical certainty and the presumption of purity and moral superiority. Democrats and other non-believers have been relegated to the status of apostates and traitors. They may be attacked, anathematized and disenfranchised without recourse to reason, respect or legality. It is open season on them, de facto by the operation of fate in the success of Trump and his allies and enablers.

The Fear of Fair Play

After the latest massacre the gun debate is on again. Gun nuts, so-called conservatives and Republicans and their assorted thug allies are mounting varyingly defensive defenses depending on how confident they are in the stranglehold the extremists have on the actual laws affecting gun ownership. That stranglehold is complete. 

The opposition doesn't even dream of significant reform and its opponents portray those inconsequential hopes for concessions and compromises, against assault weapons in a country already awash in them, for example, as inconceivable attacks on personal freedom and nonexistent and invented constitutional protections.

Of course it's all about race. The gun nuts fear that one day the people they have been flagrantly screwing and oppressing forever will both see that shafting with intense clarity and react appropriately, demanding justice if not retribution. The gun nuts fear that the oppressed masses will react the way they themselves would react, violently.

This is the new American conservativism, the exact inverse of the "golden rule" and constitutional government as outlined in our founding documents. They fear fair play and a level playing field more than anything, doubting their own ability to compete following so many decades of privilege, easy-pickings and patrimony.

Fear. That's all it is about. 

Baked by Elves

The bloodlust of the GOP hasn't been sated. Obamacare's attempted destruction and the successful, massive, tax cut giveaway are only parts of their intended assault on poorer and middle class Americans. Already the deprivations are having an effect. Persecution is everywhere in the air.

But, take heart, the marketing wing of their evil movement constantly reassures us that Republicans and conservatives, and they alone, represent what is true and good and patriotic among us. Working Americans, shafted by Trump in spite of his promises, are largely standing by their man.

And their crackers really are baked by elves. Don't you dare tell them otherwise.

Billy Graham Joins Ruth in Hell

I would love to see the look on his face when Billy Graham realizes he is going to Hell. Billy was a populist. Give the people what they want, to feel good about themselves and righteous without the inconvenience of a real moral struggle. Give them the certainty of salvation by claiming a personal relationship with Jesus, the most unverifiable thing ever. And then, to top it off, translate that personal uncertainty exemption to the political realm where it weds with the doctrines of manifest destiny and exceptionalism to enhance already arrogant and unaccountable political tendencies. 

Billy was a very important person in the creation of the new American age of moral blindness and national self-righteousness. Would George W. Bush ever have been president without Billy's seeming imprimatur? George has an avowed personal relationship with Jesus so I guess the incredible carnage he created was the will of God or whatever. Abstract Billy from this and there is no George Bush. Less carnage. Less American arrogance and imperium. Judge Billy by a biblical standard. Judge him by the fruit of his tree: greed, racism, moral decay, death and destruction. Billy, may you rot in Hell.

Don't feel bad for Billy. He can still be defended in this world by his idiot, openly bigoted heir, Trumpist and Falwell acolyte, Franklin. And then there's the $20-or-so million Billy left behind. God's work can be lucrative. Billy had his reward in this world. It all culminated in Trump and the ascendency of a morally repugnant, ethically blind, evangelical voting base.

His Heart Belongs To Daddy

Little Donnie Trump has a dream, to be the center of everything. The point isn't about the drive but about its origins. Choose the wrong question or quest and it is unanswerable and self-negating. He dreams the impossible dream.

Donnie Trump wants to be the center of the world because his daddy made him think it was the thing to do. He told Donnie he was a king and that he must win. The closer Donnie gets to that the more alone he is. He got hijacked. 

He isn't the pilot he's the plane. His daddy, a dead person, is flying it. Daddy's drives destroyed his son. We are living in a vampire movie and the outcome is uncertain. 

The Koch boys had a similarly sociopathic daddy. They were taught to win at all costs and to be good little nutballs and Birchers. The Kochs and their allies want to control us and so the world. It's right out of James Bond, a desire for wold domination.

Are we having fun yet? Life is a game of inches and averages. Extinction can result from arbitrary impulses and accidents. Perfection and certainty only exist at a scale inaccessible to us but there is no freedom there, only compulsion. 

Think of Mike Pence, who sold his soul for the certainty of packaged, fast-food faith and one-stop shopping at the salvation store.

There is freedom at our level. We can accept imperfection or choose death. But we aspire to the enslavement of perfection and certainty. It means destruction. We have chosen the wrong road. We have chosen the certainty of death by Donnie. 

We share his delusion that we're so special the rules don't apply to us but the rules apply to everybody. We are becoming more isolated, like Trump.

The next step is cultural annihilation, the end of our lives as we know them and all for nothing. The soul-suckers have drives normal people don't have, for dominance and certainty. They rule us now. It's about compulsion, not freedom. 

And you have to wonder about Donnie's admiration for a guy named Vlad.

A Separate Piece

More details are emerging on Donald Trump's compartmentalized and privileged love life, including references no normal person wants to hear, about his "package" and propensities. He conducted multiple, simultaneous affairs after marrying Melania. 

It all seems representative of his immature, unintegrated psyche and assumption of a complete lack of accountability, so much so it's possible to have some compassion for the less egregious offenders on the "me, too" list. Why shouldn't they partake?

Isn't it the prerogative of successful men in the new, American Babylon? Again, I say, this is typical of the hypocrisies of puritanical cultures. How different are we from those famously lascivious Arabs, shedding every sexual restraint at every opportunity? 

The Sarah Show

Sarah Huckabee Sanders hosts a show at the White House media franchise. Increasingly it's an arm of Fox News as Trump retreats into whatever remote corners reassure him that he is great and always right. Even by the standards at Fox the plunge is into its murkiest area of paranoia and conspiracy thinking: Hannity.

Yes, Hannity. Hannity is now a major source of inspiration for Trump. Narcissism is all about mirroring. Little Donnie has no sense of who he is independently of what people tell him and how he sees himself otherwise reflected in some hideous creation, like Trump Tower. He always requires reassurance and validation. 

This need has swallowed up the entire executive branch and compromised Congress. What else will it ingest? That is the question. We are left with the feeble efforts of the Huckabee interface as an assumed source of information and an avenue of accountability. Poor Sarah, whose life is defined entirely by her faith.

All she can do is blatantly lie in front of the whole world. Why bother with her. It is now the fate of America to reflect and mirror Trump in some way--as a failed casino, tacky tower or golf course sucking down resources like mad for the amusement of the few...the elect...the rich white men. Those are our options. 

I fear the casino fate most but can't resign myself to any of it.

Acres of Crooks

Is it possible? Is the scam finally unraveling? How long has it been? I would argue that it began in the sixties because certain people took the effervescent openness and optimism of that decade WAY too seriously and processed it as a real revolution (think: Dick Cheney). They saw it as an invitation to social upheaval and chaos requiring an authoritarian reaction, crusade and vendetta. Hell, it was nothing but another Great Awakening.

The sixties were puritanical and utopian--one generation self-righteously unloading on another, insisting on insight, moral superiority and a schismatic's demand for a level of individualism ending in isolation and doctrinal decomposition. Remember, Evangelicalism might seem stodgy but they were (are) mystics of a sort--believers in revelation and an individual, irreproducible, experiential and unscalable mind-meld with God. 

They are fans of gnosis, not reason. Similarly, hippies sought enlightenment through drugs and other irrational means. And they founded utopian communities, their versions of the New Jerusalem. How utterly American. Puritanism ruins everything in America. Even feminists succumbed, defining their successes and failures in left-brain, analytical terms and becoming famously strident, uncompromising, angry and judgmental. 

But, back to the scam. Republicans have descended into a pit of sin. Republicanism is now an identity movement and a morass of unreason--as self-righteous as it is self-serving, power-hungry and unprincipled. The fruit of their tree is death and despair. They have declared themselves the true inheritors of the American traditions and not because they act it. They are God's chosen people so it doesn't matter that they are crooks.

And the entire country is infested with them, gnawing away at its guts.

Trainspotting Trump

Of the many shades of horror associated with rogue rule there are passivity and impotence in the face of injustice. The result is mute rage. Who can stand to live there? Normal people choose numbness, trying to somehow selectively obliterate feeling. Who can blame them but it easily ends up going wholesale--the blanketing, encompassing anesthetics of addiction, obsession, compartmentalization and dissociation.

Large-living goes small, a struggle for spiritual survival on a daily basis. The rates of opioid addiction can only get worse now but lesser avenues of escape are more common.

Desensitizing oneself comes at the price of isolation and fear. It is not reality. Sure, bills must be paid. All of the practical needs must be met but the focus narrows to everyday, individual psychic survival at the cost of everything else. It never works in the face of social disintegration because security is a social construct. But the consciences of decent people are stifled anyway by the larger onslaught of inhumanity.

Normal people withdraw from life into whatever existential shelter they can find at the expense of practical considerations and their freedom of conscience. This is a dark vision but it has been imposed on us. We are extras in our own dramas now, our fates determined by lunatics and sociopaths. The Great Recession was a harbinger. The mission is the full abandoning and disenfranchising of common citizens. 

It will be justified as necessary after the next, inevitable crash being compulsively guaranteed by the deregulators. Meanwhile, one foot in front of the other. 

We are reduced to that. 

Republicans are Primates

On the destruction of trust, the descent into barbarism, the mother the of all tongue-trashings and the cascade of lies, language theory gives us insight into Republicanism (from Wikipedia):

Animal vocal signals are, for the most part, intrinsically reliable. When a cat purrs, the signal constitutes direct evidence of the animal's contented state. We trust the signal, not because the cat is inclined to be honest, but because it just cannot fake that sound. Primate vocal calls may be slightly more manipulable, but they remain reliable for the same reason—because they are hard to fake.^[41]Primate social intelligence is "Machiavellian"—self-serving and unconstrained by moral scruples. Monkeys and apes often attempt to deceive each other, while at the same time remaining constantly on guard against falling victim to deception themselves.^[42][43]Paradoxically, it is theorized that primates' resistance to deception is what blocks the evolution of their signalling systems along language-like lines. Language is ruled out because the best way to guard against being deceived is to ignore all signals except those that are instantly verifiable. Words automatically fail this test.^[20]

Words are easy to fake. Should they turn out to be lies, listeners will adapt by ignoring them in favor of hard-to-fake indices or cues. For language to work, then, listeners must be confident that those with whom they are on speaking terms are generally likely to be honest.^[44]A peculiar feature of language is "displaced reference", which means reference to topics outside the currently perceptible situation. This property prevents utterances from being corroborated in the immediate "here" and "now". For this reason, language presupposes relatively high levels of mutual trust in order to become established over time as an evolutionarily stable strategy. This stability is born of a longstanding mutual trust and is what grants language its authority. A theory of the origins of language must therefore explain why humans could begin trusting cheap signals in ways that other animals apparently cannot (see signalling theory).

The Republican assault on intelligibility isn't merely a Machiavellian power play aimed at circumscribed, short-term goals, though it is that. It is an assault on civilization in an era when circumstances demand responsibility. The human capacities for good and evil are greater than ever. So, more than ever, this is not the time to screw it up.

(The excerpt is from "Origin of language")

They Might be Midgets

The dwarf army has taken over in Washington. Recall the "seven dwarfs" testimonies from 1994 when the heads of all the major tobacco companies swore under oath before Congress to the non-addictive properties of nicotine.

They might be gone but their spirit lives on. The tobacco titans were corporate aspects of the dwarf army now emerging from everywhere to run the American empire and state, men without conscience and motivated only by greed. 

Did Obama Care?

I was there in '08. For some people the long-awaited turning point had come. Finally there would be some accountability for the decades of Republican mismanagement, malfeasance and perfidy. It appeared that the world had seen the horror and insanity of Bush and the neocons and that the American voters had owned their shit, electing a reserved, rational black man to replace him.

Republicans had trashed everything they had touched. Obama's failure to hold the criminals accountable could be understood though it disappointed anyone interested in justice. He had inherited a world economy on the brink of collapse, the immediate result of Republican deregulatory insanity. And the Middle East was in flames and hundreds of thousands were dead. He had his hands full.

In the end there was no accountability. None of the neocons suffered personally. They moved on into respected positions when they should have been in jail. And, when all was said and done the rich got richer and the poor got poorer. The forces of evil were only emboldened. Republicans sabotaged Obama's presidency from beginning to end. It should have been clear in his first midterm election.

The American voters were implicated. They couldn't own the catastrophes of the modern American imperium. They only wanted to feel safe and comfortable and righteous. God had chosen us. We were the elect. It didn't matter what we did. But it does matter. Eventually we will pay but not the instigators. Just like the neocons and Bush the ringleaders will walk away probably unscathed.

I don't know why Obama failed at this though I think there were "realists" and cynics in the mix. Rahm Emmanuel is a left-wing version of a right-wing thug. Other thugs were already in place, the bullies of the American military, forever optimistic about their mission and usually avoiding culpability. Technically civilians are responsible and in charge but Obama wasn't able to stop the ongoing lunacy.

And now we have Trump and the full blossoming of doom. Americans are addicts on many fronts and will never own it or only when it is too late. I am convinced of that now. We are living the primal drama of good against evil and we have sided with evil. Congratulations, America. We are shit. We are the bad guys. Try to "John Wayne" your way out of that. It's what got us there in the first place.