Our Achilles (Heel)

Trump is our Achilles, withholding himself from battle--every rational challenge we face--while sulking in self-pity.

He represents our need to feel right no matter how badly we behave. Do you see why the evangelicals love him? 

In their eyes he was CHOSEN, obviously not having succumbed to the heresies of good works and self-determination.

He has never had a decent impulse in his life. Rather, he is evidence of the irrationality and inscrutability of election.

That such a hopeless shit-pile should be the recipient of such gifts must be a manifesting of God's will. So, there.

It was our destiny--the destiny of annihilation, the thing evangelicals have always longed for anyway. Make ready.

The end-times are here.

Disaster Prepped by Bushes

Let us not forget, witnessing Donald Trump's heroically bottomless, infantile ego and self-centeredness, that it has been foreshadowed by Bushes and other failures for years.

Assumptions of privilege obtain: there will be no accountability, practitioners of their dark arts are exempt from judgement, and they are right by birth and association.

How they act is irrelevant.

One Mississippi...

Whatever happened to the old ways of a place like Mississippi, where structural violence, woven into the social fabric, resulted in a kind of peace? The structures and values--the idolatry of property and privilege--were successfully transplanted to Washington. 

Democrats are the new black underclass, technically enfranchised but effectively powerless. Even in electoral victory Democrats are prevented from having a a voice. The occasional, real success, like Obamacare, becomes a point of unhinged, primal antipathy.

Yes, we are living in the Confederacy. I never expected the actual transformation from racist shithole to responsible society to be easy but I thought the superego of the commonwealth, as displayed in the early days of civil rights, would guarantee eventual progress.

In some number of generations racial animus would be rare. Integration would be natural. But the southern states have always voted for a racist agenda, especially since the insult of desegregation. Yankees are naïve, self-absorbed and insufficiently motivated. 

As happened before in the South, this corrupt system will fail. Mississippian Haley Barbour has peddled influence in Washington with immense success and played the benign "massa" back home. Privilege is ensconced again everywhere. The plantations are back.

Our economy is based on exploitation, masked because of internationalism, overall wealth and new technologies. Risks move downwards, to average citizens. Rewards accrue upwards into the hands of an over-rewarded class contemptuous of everyone else.

The countdown to our reckoning begins: one Mississippi...

Chaos Theory

My thinking on the Trump administration is that it is a feckless, chaotic, predatory mess of corruption motivated by greed and compulsions to domination and triumphalist displays of cruelty. Add to this self-righteousness and a sense of destiny provided by the evangelicals and it is a recipe for the end of life as we know it.

The Medium is a Mess

Social Media is a monster. Undeniably, some of its innocent, low-level effects are good but, overall, the connectedness now dominates the entities being connected. Egotism, even in its more innocuous forms, is eventually self-negating. Secure, happy people don't need it. They crave a less widely distributed, higher quality of intimacy, not a kind of fame.

A Life in Irony

I am right behind the nucleus of the baby-boom and it is an amazing place to be, spending your entire life so near (maybe a 32nd beat away) to an ictus in a thundering pulse of iambic activity, subsumed as an imperceptible technicality. Provided, in any event, you don't subscribe to their ethos of mindless self-centeredness. 

I do not. It is a view up the ass-end of the greatest display of selfishness ever at a closely uncomfortable distance. Boomers will make their exit having raped and looted the past and mortgaged the future, possibly of the entire world and forever, their greed reaching beyond the shores and bounds of the wealthiest nation in history. 

Does anyone believe that Donald Trump is an accident or an aberration? He is the swine king, a high priest of decadence and lord of the fairways from which the boomers will be raptured in a haze of viagra and other drugs. They have had allies in this. Souls are always for sale in certain markets. There the slaves auction themselves.

Revival tents come to mind. Specimens of this generational catastrophe may be viewed, self-segregated, in the gated golf-communities. We should lock them in. They have locked us out, and we deserve protection. The baleful effects of the boomers are inescapable. Trump testifies to that. Whatever they have it is never enough.

Strangers in Paradise

How is it that the New Jerusalem of the evangelical Christians so resembles a mafia outpost, fascist puppet state, prison or plantation? One of these incredibly evil people, a preacher named Jeffress--a charlatan, bigot and slimeball of Falwellian egotism, moral presumption and ethical obtuseness--has spoken pridefully at the opening of the (our) new embassy in Jerusalem.

Palestinians were slaughtered in celebration, a curious offering to the real gods of the hucksters and hawkers of bogus salvation--used-car salesmen billed as saviors. Their gods are their own ambition and conceit. For many of them (see "Swaggart") the laying-on-of-hands has led them into the arms of prostitutes and young women and men, and into the pockets of the unsophisticated poor. 

What the hell--God has chosen winners and losers. Isn't it godlike to do the same? Look hard at the audacity and arrogance of that and try to reconcile it with anything found in the Bible. Try to reconcile their vast fortunes and mega-churches with anything like the life of Christ. But don't do it for too long because they are coming after you. Prepare to defend yourselves. 

They are after your jobs, healthcare, retirement and anything else they can take. And they think they are the agents of God's will in this, purifying the world through fire, the sword and Paul Ryan. Purifying you, that is. They are already saved and don't need it. Funny how that works. We are strangers in their paradise, illegal inhabitants of a sectarian utopia and subject to deportation.

The Apocalypse Smiles Back

Finally, I am making my peace with the end-times. Until now my apathy has been enforced by powerlessness as I longed for a restoration of rational, constitutional rule. In my dreams I was a Karl Rove of the left, an über-effective, behind-the-scenes guy driving the rogues out of town, then resting on my rotting laurels in a cushy think tank somewhere.

What ever happened to tar and feathers? Consider those deserving to be ridden out of Washington on a rail and chucked over a boundary into a gated retirement, possibly in prison. Why bother anymore. The Gingrichers are leaving anyway or gone. The corruption of the government--the thing they longed for in the first place--is accomplished.

Newt was always a standing insult to decency. Now he skulks around the Vatican under the skirts of his wife. Her only qualification for ambassadress was adultery, the structural perversion, insolence and impiety of that a fitting culmination. Meanwhile, new recruits in their places man the galleys and engine rooms of an already pirated ship. 

The destination--annihilation--has been pre-programmed into its system. The crew have all been schooled, indoctrinated, and sworn to ideological steadfastness. They too will perish but fatalists don't care. We are stuck with them. Why fight it anymore? Our helplessness is perfect and complete. I have smiled at the apocalypse and it is smiling back. 

Chasing the Parvenus: the Conservative Cult and the Ascent of the Lie

In the hands of Republican rogues lies have become ends in themselves. Incoherence is incarnated in chaos, despair and social disintegration. The word "conservative" itself is a lie. Conservativism is a cult. Obedience is essential and unanimity is required. Dissent is not tolerated.

The doctrines and the repository of accepted opinions, embedded in code language and doublespeak, change daily. Followers tune-in to Fox News to be reprogrammed in real time. Submission is expected and incoherent opinions result in incoherent people. Integrity is abandoned.

In the absence of an agreed-upon cult leader and coherent beliefs the followers look outward and are unified only by antipathy and aggression. It is a religion of hatred and fear. There must be enemies. Fox News and all the enmity are now mirrored perfectly in the White House.

Elusive Butterflies of Bullshit

Words and stuff emerge from Trump's mouth and the political machine surrounding him--enablers, underlings and assorted opportunists. These butterflies--the edicts, tweets and whatever--are uncatchable by hand and there are so many of them. I am drawing close to some of them now.

Wait, they aren't butterflies at all but miniature predator drones disguised. They are miniature drones of destruction, reducing reason, integrity and intelligibility to mush and madness. Trump and his evil forces create confusion and despair. They instill hatred, mistrust and envy.

And those little drones are weaponized. The lies are ready to defend themselves.

Animal Drives

Since Americans have given up on their ethics and openly extol living like pigs I wanted to look inside that movement and see if there is a hierarchy there, and substructures and differentiation. Previously, as an outsider to the sty, I had approached it as a monolith, regarding it as an odd, aboriginal, anachronistic alt-culture, something mostly abandoned with the evolutionary growth of a prefrontal cortex, writing, literacy, and all the arts, traditions and technologies usually known as "civilization."

How naïve I was. I never wittingly chose to enter the sty but it has encompassed all of us in a kind of psychological, suburban sprawl of filth. The sprawl is now affecting the physical environment in an unprecedented and bad way, the conundrum of consciousness requiring that human beings be either more or less than animals. We can't choose to be exclusively animals again and exit the territory of the morality of consciousness, the subject of many myths such as the story of Adam and Eve in the Garden of Eden.

Anyway, we have tried to deny our humanity and return to an idealized natural state, an impossibility. The first distinction I see among the swine is between determinists and romantics. Determinists argue that our animal nature is inescapable and should therefore be embraced and indulged. Dog eat dog. That, of course, is the inverse of the reality--that our humanity and uniqueness in the animal kingdom is a fact--and the argument is therefore reductive, circular and self-negating. We are singular in our power, if nothing else.

The romantics believe the sty is an appropriate place to inhabit and that it doesn't stink--a tenet and creed belied by a perceptible pungency. They wallow in the muck with abandon, inured to the stench. A romantic outlook can be a beautiful thing if it is rooted in reality. But all the lies, infighting and perversion evident in the shitshow reveal the truth of its squalor. So, the romantics believe that the sty is not inevitable but that it is our due. Evangelical Christians are romantics. Trumpists are among the determinists. 

True Trumpists are greed mavens and money-men--followers, formally or not, of Ayn Rand's hideous doctrines. Nothing in her cynical, incoherent work deserves to be called theoretical. Evangelicals, such as Sarah Sanders, compare creation to some fantasy of godly perfection and therefore expect the sty and roll around in it happily, not realizing it is their degraded creation and not God's. I have to go now and wipe the slime from my eyes. I will be back and report further on the awful mess we have fallen into.

Carrion Consciousness

This is what it feels like to be a corpse--a corpse of a country. The vultures show up out of nowhere. And there are so many of them. What a thing to witness.

Rudy Will Get His Lies Straight

Donald Trump has come out in support of his bumbling, incompetent counsel, Rudy Giuliani. He knows Rudy has his heart in the right place--loyalty before conscience, a reverence for authority, and a conviction that power is its own justification.

Donald knows Rudy will get his lies straight. It was lot to master on short notice.

Apocalypse Soon

Some shill and henchman of the apocalypse, an intimate of Trump, has reported he has never seen Herr Donald lie, only exaggerate. His interviewer expressed due amazement.

Be not amazed. These are not lies or even a web of lies but a delusional system, familiar to those with experience of paranoia. To get there the Trumpists give up on their humanity. 

No big deal, in certain circles.

Real psychopaths can't help it. Ours are mostly sociopaths, narcissists, greed-monsters and children of privilege. Their own sins are revealed in the accusations and insults they hurl.

Those apply to themselves. Back at you, Donald. It is necessary, to begin to understand it, to give up on reality. It will drive you crazy if you don't. Oddly, it must be appreciated as art.

It is the art of the end-times.

The Big Creep

I recall once a use of the word "you" that stunned me, coming from a German expat who worked mostly in Africa. It wasn't personal and individual, but a collective use, referring to me as an American and wondering how "we" could have resoundingly reelected the obviously rogue, illegal, incompetent government of George W. Bush after witnessing the destruction he and his hoodlums had caused already.

The damage was clearly still building to its climax in economic collapse and international military and diplomatic humiliation, so maybe we were only dancing with the girl we came with, out of a sense of honor or some other misguided, idiotic, chivalric try at consistency driven by vanity and false pride of a playground level of sophistication. Whew, I'm glad we survived that! It was an aberration!

Not so fast. Enter Trump.

Perhaps we would still like to think "we" are good people at heart and mean well but it isn't going to fly anymore--not since Trump, and reasonably much sooner. The level of denial involved in the conviction that we aren't represented by the actual, murderous, grotesquely brutish effects of our elected government is too great to stomach and suicidally addictive in its severity. It is as epic in its aspect as it is cowardly. 

It requires a level of dissociation worthy of the Taliban and other such groups that embrace the inevitable dishonor of a personal code of narrow, tribal focus, raping and murdering at will in the name of some assumption of a divine mandate. How are we different? We aren't anymore and Trump proves it. Donald is representative of us. No protest is enough. It never should have happened and "we" can't disown it.

Madness to the Method

There is madness to the method of Republicans. There is no rational goal, endpoint or outcome. Rather, they employ fanatical tactics to win battles in a war they will inevitably lose. Somebody tell them, we are all on the same side. You can't win by fighting yourselves and sabotaging the system that got you there.

Gag Economy

American workers, deemed not so much unworthy as replaceable and irrelevant by the capitalists, are being throttled and gagged. Watch for it, parallel worlds of powerlessness and plenty. The workers are so stripped of influence the capitalists don't even see them. Working people have no voice at all. And the parasites only grow stronger.

The Revolution Will Not Be Televised

Actually, it was, but we were watching so much other stuff at the same time we mistook it for entertainment. Better luck next time!