Religious Freedom

Religious freedom. I’ve got it. You’ve got it. Who’s worried about it? Jeff Sessions is worried about it. He’s worried about it because his religion and the religion of likeminded southerners and others isn’t Christianity, it’s racism.

Yes, his religion is under attack. His religion is rightly vilified and fought against. His religion, in its public expression as discrimination and abuse, is illegal. Understand now that this has nothing to do with real religious freedom.

It’s about the freedom to be a bigot.

Cut Bannon's Balls Off

Steve Bannon's miserable presence has resurfaced, enlivened, as a defender of Trump after a whirlwind, pro-Nazi tour of Europe. I know that any Democratic presidential candidate will cut his balls off. They will strip him naked and march him down the street to be lashed and battered. Bannon will be pistol-whipped and pummeled. He will be kicked and spat upon. His eyes will be gouged out and his fingernails extracted. He will be hurled from a wall and dragged by a horse. He will be drawn, quartered and roasted on a spit. He will be drowned upside down. He will be knee-capped, IRA style, in honor of his Irish roots. His teeth will be pulled from his head and shoved down his throat. He will violated up the ass with prods and pokers. He will be vivisected and embalmed alive. We will drill holes in his skull and suck his brains out. He will be fed to sharks and snakes.

I'm only trying to get in the spirit of the next electoral cycle as fantasized by Bannon himself, master of sadistic tropes and similes, though maybe I’m being a bit more graphic. I mean it all metaphorically, of course. No harm intended, just like Steve...

Inscrutability Clause

Some people are so critical it's necessary to crack their psychology to try to understand them. There we see a perspective--there's no need to comment if there's nothing wrong, if nothing needs correcting. Similarly we now see, in Republican circles, that the truth is left to its own defense. 

Why bother asserting it? It's the lies that need defending. Republicans chivalrously show up to fight for the honor and virginal purity of untruths. Untruths aren't sullied by the stain of human reason. Untruths have a whiff of godliness about them, being inscrutable, abstracted and otherworldly. 

Take that, ye peddlers of the blasphemies of reason, thou arrogant apostates and defamers of revelations! 

The Renunciation

God calls everyone. There are those who don’t listen or for whom the call is drowned out and hard to hear. They are so involved in other things. They are so involved in themselves.

Then there are those who reject God and the very idea of God. This is always a form of idolatry. It’s impossible to exist in that vacuum so they try to fill it, often with themselves.

Originalist Sin

It appears that we are destined and doomed to another douchebag "originalist" on the Supreme Court. They fight the culture wars with the muskets and swords of Jesuitical indirection, rationalization and obfuscation, not that these weapons are ineffective. Anachronism puts an end to rational investigation.

They are claiming primal, biblical insight into the aboriginal meaning of our founding documents, so the temporal disconnect serves them well. With those documents held hostage, under lock and key, they only allow exceptions and concessions when they like, notably in armaments and the tools of empire and invasion.

An important subtext to the 2nd Amendment is that the founders were terrified of the prospect of large standing armies and stores of munitions. I demand therefore, in originalist spirit, that we return to actual muskets and knives, kept in the homes of average citizens and practiced upon varmints and Injuns, militia-style.

I will let them have billion dollar warplanes when we can have appropriate, available education and medical care. How have these not changed as much as warfare, influenced by technology and industrialization? Meanwhile, if we are stuck with him, at least Kavanaugh is supposed to be a courteous originalist prick.

An Emerging Understanding

The Cohen tapes make clear that Trump is capable of lucidity, planning and organized thought. It means that Trump is a con man. Con men belong in jail. Friends, we have our answer. Trump is a criminal and a crook. We must LOCK HIM UP.

Dog Eat Blog

Why do any of us bother? Look at the list of possible candidates to run against Trump. It is painful. This is a choice? Maybe Kirsten Gillibrand. We know now the entire Republican establishment is locked in the cockpit with Trump and they will fly us into a hillside before they do the decent thing and shoot him in the head (metaphorically, I mean...) and return a qualified person to the controls of our hijacked and ailing democracy.

Energy, determination and idealism abound in the ranks of the opposition but at the top it’s nothing but mind-numbing inertia and incompetence. Where is the fucking outrage? I’ll tell you, it’s so simple—every time you open your fucking mouths you talk about the lies. You assert that everything Republicans say is a lie. And... THEY caused the Great Recession. THEY bankrupted the government. THEY sent your jobs away forever.

THEY spent all our infrastructure funds on money-eating military fiascos in the Middle East WHILE cutting taxes on their cronies. All of this happens to be true. Yes, this is my report and writing assignment returned to you, dear Democratic leaders. I submit it humbly, and prayerfully ask you to GET OFF YOUR FUCKING ASSES AND DO SOMETHING. Thank you, they say, and turn away to their tea and scones. I return later for my response.

The dog ate my blog, they say.

Spicey's Lament

Sean Spicer's book absolves him of any responsibility for the crimes of Trump's calamitous rule. He was only doing his job. He was following orders. Donald was duly elected. It all happened so fast. They were heady times. Someone was holding a gun to his head.

Well, maybe not that last one but it all sounds very Third Reich. Sean, I recommend a trip to the Holocaust Museum in Washington. You are not absolved. You are responsible. Quit trying to save your own ass and think about somebody else for a change. 

The Existential Tourist

God doesn't give a shit about you. Your destiny was sealed at birth and you weren't one of the elect. The Bible tells you so, in so many words.

The Falwells tell you so. Franklin Graham tells you so. All the "prosperity gospel" preachers tell you so. God made your bed and you are stuck with it.

What to do, what to do... It's awful not being chosen. What are we doing here? Why did God make us, anyway, if we were only fated for shit?

These questions are unanswerable but you must have faith. You must have faith in your own shithood. The elect are entitled to life, eternally.

You are only an existential tourist, probably ballast for the lives of superior beings. Don't let it get you down. I have no other answer or advice.

This Vicarious Life

One manifestation of Puritanism is a reverence for celebrities. They, the chosen, realize their destinies and lesser beings look on in awe. Puritanical cultures are polarized. Fortunate people are existentially super-enfranchised and their lives are validated and enhanced by their successes. Their lives burgeon and swell with a surfeit of every good thing. It is enabled by the assumption of their limitless deservedness.

The thing builds on itself. They are somehow more human. Conversely, little people accept a reduced status as their due and participate in their own belittling. Their lives shrink in significance, They are coopted into intensifying the polarization and validating their own inconsequence by fatalistic and sick beliefs, becoming so separated from the “haves” they don’t even feel envy. They invest in the lives of the chosen as spectators.

It is a carnival and calamity of inhumanity, corruption and existential folly--degrading to everyone involved. The egos of the elect achieve magnificent, delusional proportions. Poor and working people see their lives shivel and diminish in their own estimation and presumably in God’s. They receive routine intimations of their end in ashes, dust and decay as others see their godliness materialized in earthly rewards.

Like a Rolling Stone

Many tactics comprise the compromising onslaught of corruption bedeviling our beloved country. But the sum of these tactics is a tactic in itself, if not a strategy--to overwhelm the opposition with the sheer scope and intensity of the treachery.

Always, those trying to protect the institutions and traditions of democracy are back on their heels. And, for the perpetrators, no stain of accusation sticks as they roll along like a stone, one outrage after another, now on a downhill path of momentum.

There must be a valley there somewhere. There isn't a point or goal to the destruction. It's now its own end and an addiction--compulsive vandalism. We watch, helplessly hoping--hoping it will end and that something will be left when it does.

One Appropriate Remedy

There's only one appropriate remedy after the double-whammy of the release of a new batch of indictments from Robert Mueller and Trump's amazing display of selective, self-serving credulity in Europe--he doubts, challenges and insults our allies, presumably decent people in positions of accountability, and kowtows to a mafia boss and enforcer with an indeterminate mandate. 

That they have in common.

Anyway, the 2016 presidential election should be nullified. I won't call Trump a traitor. I wouldn't even accuse him of an act of betrayal. There's nothing for an accusation to stick to. Trump is an ethical non-entity. He's "non-compos" and out-to-lunch. Let’s give him a permanent lunch break. He deserves it. But the tide of insanity that elected him is going nowhere. We need to deal with that.

Fundamentalist, evangelical Christians are behind it. They reject reason going back to the Enlightenment. They are afraid of its implications for salvation and the worship of God, so their posture in relation to God is degradation and their motivating impulse is fear. America is an Enlightenment country. They reject that. The "treason" runs that deep. It's a massive movement of unreason. 

Synchronized Sinning

You wonder how they do it--the soul-crushing lies of the southern white children: Sarah Sanders, Mitch McConnell, Jeff Sessions and all the rest. The lies flow out of them. Would that evangelicals went to confession!

"Father, I lied my ass off." Next week: "Father, I lied my ass off." Would you find a new priest every week to keep alive the presumption of contrition? Or justify it as white lying or in the service of a greater good?

I don't know. Somehow all the lies, justifications and rationalizations sync up and I don't think it's a conspiracy. There's a river that runs deep in these people—of repressed hatred and fear. It must be rooted in an injury.

Ah, the Civil War and desegregation. The rape of the South. They was done wrong. Clearly, they have no conscious access to the hate. Not most of them. They go to church. Their identities are entirely based on Jesus.

They identify with Jesus. They have had a faith experience and know they are saved and destined for heaven. They are certain they are good people. What do you say to that? I wish they would just stop lying. 

Plead diminished capacity for them but there are still all the lies. I know, they can't help it. It's strange that they insist on personal salvation. They behave like ants or some other kind of insect--like they are programmed.

A Self-Righteous Little Prig

I'm putting this out there, hoping someone with the opportunity and some kind of voice will call Brett Kavanaugh a "self-righteous little prig" as he is considered for confirmation. 

On the Road Again

We've seen it all before--the Trumpian road trip--but it's still startling when the insanity kicks in. Was there ever a man more self-centered and incompetent? Watch as the insults fly. They are the point. There is no end-game, unless you mean the evangelicals' national death wish. Aggression is the point. Donald is entertaining himself, as always, instinctively dominating everything and succeeding because he will play dirtier and go lower. 

Six feet under would suit him.

Trump Shamu

A quick look at Brett Kavanaugh's record and it's obvious why Trump chose him. Trump is covering his criminal ass and he identifies with Shamu and killer whales generally. In fact, it's amazing that such a perfect fit would exist.

Brett helped steal an election and defended the rights of corporations (read, "predators") to the exclusion of citizens. Corporations have rights. Individuals, not so much. He sided with Sea World against culpability for an eaten attendant.

What could be more symbolic and Trumpian? We are fodder and detritus. Working people are no longer needed in Trump-world, that burden having been shifted abroad. Opioids destroy us. Life-expectancy declines as profits soar.

Kavanaugh persecuted the Clintons over nothing and then argued for immunity as Bush wrecked the world. He has asserted that a president, while president, should be impervious to prosecution. Well, what did you expect?

It's time for our boy Trump to be beached. Kavanaugh will resist that in every possible way.

Take That, Motherfucker

I was really rooting for black people back in the day. I still root for black people. They have been treated unconscionably, down to now. Thus, it was a blow to my early hopes for racial progress when the black guys began using "motherfucker" every other word. I supposed their PR person was away that day. But now I understand the amazing wisdom and perception of the black guys.

They know lies when they see them. They know innuendo and cant. The mealy-mouthed bullshit masquerading among white people as wisdom and concern doesn't fool them. They see the structural inequity and oppression. And they saw, before it was obvious to us all, that America is the land of motherfuckers -- the realm, kingdom, plantation and domain of assholes and injustice.

The Metaphysics of Me-ism

I hesitate to call Donald an egotist because it sounds abstracted and analytical. This is a man who, if he were placed on a scale balanced against the rest of creation it would, in his estimation, tip in his favor. It would continue to tip in his favor as the exercise expanded into interstellar space, galaxies, the cosmos and parallel dimensions.

"Egotism" doesn't capture that, seeming to me to assume a normal social context of competing egos and assorted ids and other, unintegrated bits. Donald's subsumes, encompasses and negates all other "existences" thereby swallowing them up as an unimaginable orifice of life-negation, a kind of digestive tract of doom. 

Now, then. What is the metaphysics of that? Even evil has a context. This is something claiming status as the context, a godhead, an entity that thinks it is "meta" everything and is therefore “meta” nothing and without higher content, a bodily being postured not only as transcendent but all-encompassing. Trump is therefore self-negating.

He is so powerfully so he also negates everything around him, like a force field of ruin. His evident and somewhat encompassing corporeality negates his assumptions of superiority. This is the metaphysics of Trump, characteristically resting on an inversion and constituting an anti-metaphysics and regression into nothingness.

Yes, Chinese...

Yes, Chinese, it is really happening. You are being hit with the full force of the brilliance of the deal-making and negotiating skills of Donald Trump. I know, it is hard to take in and comprehend. You were accustomed to working with the neolib's and the Wall Street types who would sell their mothers for short-term profits. You could understand that. It was sick but at least intelligible. Though, I have observed that you respect your mothers more than we do. It is obvious from the Chinese people living among us in America.

The neolib's would sell out their country and fellow citizens in a heartbeat but, what the hell, if Americans were stupid enough to elect them that was their problem, right? Sure, you knew you were getting away with some shit and would have given ground but Herr Donald isn't acting within those parameters. He only wants to feel like a big man. 

That is the point, the incredible feeling of the POWER of not caring if the whole world economy implodes because of you and millions of people die, the freedom of the riotous abandon of not giving a shit about anything at all. This is the face of the American social-conservatives, an ill-wind from the south. They are "premillennialists"  and believe the destruction of the world will be followed by a reign of Jesus, for 1000 years. It is crazy as fuck. You can see why they love Trump. He has "end-times" written all over him.

Anyway, we are in the same boat. Rational, caring Americans are in awe of Donald's fecklessness and depravity. Let us join together to depose Trump and create a better world. Word is, our elections are pretty easy to hack. As an American I might be held responsible but y'all can go ahead full-steam and try to influence the midterms and beyond.

May God be with you. We are pretty helpless over here. The other side is too well-funded, driven, and now as reckless as Trump. They are batshit crazy. Sorry, do you know the idiom? Look it up but don't get too fixated on the terminology. What I mean to say is, on behalf of myself and my fellow citizens, HELP! And, welcome to the guano-sphere.

No Safe Space

Beginning when I was about twelve we began to have family problems. Up until then I thought we were very lucky but it went bad quickly. It involved my sister's flaming descent into incurable instability. Her eventual death was indirectly self-induced.

Then my mother got sick and died. Meanwhile, all of the other structures I thought unshakable and permanent began to weaken and decline. My father was too stunned and overwhelmed to counteract the chaos. It wasn't that bad, by some standards.

But it was to me because I hadn't been "hardened off" when I was younger. I didn't have the boundaries and defenses. I look back now on my vision of myself from the inside and compare it to my actual behaviors and to how I must have appeared. 

I was a mess. Shame sets in. I had no "safe place" to enable me to recover. My childhood home had become a place of unrest and pain and there was nowhere else. People need safe spaces--especially children but even as adults. We have none now. 

Trump has seen to that. Anyone who thinks they are safe is uninformed. And people who don't feel secure act out. They lash out and misbehave. It's not admirable but it's understandable. Shame sets in. Denial sets in. If it's bad enough it can't be faced. 

The people have to die, symbolically or actually. That is where we are heading--some kind of death and then possibly a rebirth. Symbolic death and rebirth is easier and a more likely outcome but it doesn't rule out a lot of actual death among the innocent. 

Our entire society might implode or end up in the ditch, collateral to the crash-out of the addicts. It is all from within. We have no rational threats. We are our own enemies. Primitive shit kicks in when people feel unsafe and Trump pushes every button imaginable.

It's the only real talent he has. He is a born a bully and a troll, with one reaction to every challenge, to smash and humiliate anyone who resists him. THIS man is supposed to be responsible for the “rule of law” in our culture. It isn't just a travesty. It's a horror. 

Pray for the ditch. Pray for a symbolic death and a possibility of recovery. It's the best we can hope for now.

The Inhumanists

"Sadism" sounds so weird. Who would do that? They don't know, of course, that they are doing it or they think it is justified. It involves compartmentalization, projection, a delusionally defensive outlook or some other misanthropic personality malfunction. It's as easy to recognize as it is incomprehensible. 

It is all around us now, more openly than ever. It feeds on itself. Trump, the seething opportunist, doesn't even "present" in this way. I don't think he means to hurt anybody, he is that disconnected. For the real thing look at Jeff Sessions. Look at Mitch McConnell. Look at Paul Ryan. There will always be individual sadists. 

A society can absorb that. What a society can't absorb is an identity movement of sadists, a tribe of persecutory sociopaths. And we have that now. It is the old Confederacy. The Reb's were unable to get over the insult of finally having the Yankees try to end their regime of violence, hatred and oppression. 

We are living in the Confederacy now. Everything is about property and privilege. They vote as a bloc. It has enabled them to take over. Our system is based on assumptions about individual behavior which are based on assumptions about individual human nature. Those assumptions are now false.

The tribalists have won. The country is no longer ours. It's a sick entity reflecting a sick minority. The innocent will suffer more than anyone. It's always that way. The delusions create stronger drives than any sense of reality. Hate and division is stronger than togetherness and love, in the short run. 

We might be in very big trouble. The inhumanists feel small. They feel vulnerable. They feel slighted and insulted. In their twisted minds the anger and aggression are justified. They actually enjoy seeing other people suffer, as hard as that is to understand. It makes them feel more stable and secure. 

This is very sick shit. And we are awash in it.

Colored People and Catholics

If a hurricane comes your way pray you are not living in a place with a lot of colored people and Catholics, like Puerto Rico or New Orleans. You will be screwed. Better to be in Texas. Texans figured out how to suck off the government decades ago and never let up. And it sure doesn't hurt that there are a lot of pretty white Protestants there.

Logos vs. Chaos

We are witnessing much more than a partisan political struggle for short-term ends or even a battle for the soul of a nation. It is Star Wars, good against evil, and we are too conditioned to diminish our daily experiences in relation to mythical clashes to see the significance of it. Sure, it is an assault on decency and moderation.

Yes, it is the rejection of compromise and conciliation. Truly, it is an assertion of the "will to power" over inalienable rights. But it is more than all of these. It is another attempt to plunge humanity back into the abyss of meaninglessness. It is chaos overtaking intelligibility, the inversion of everything civilization stands for.

Scumbag Millionaires

I have never begrudged anybody anything. But now those with the most want to deprive everyone else of everything they can, even to the point of throwing away money on fruitless wars and burning though it in other ways to keep it out of the hands of their inferiors.

Watch how sociopaths and scum flock to the Republican Party, drawn to its cruelty by a lust for power and opportunities to bask in a culture of trolls and bullies. There must be a similar thing happening among the money people, as opposed to the social conservatives. 

The implication is that many of the wealthy supporters of the Republican web of lies are wealthy not because they are good but because there are not. They were willing to go lower--to do anything and abandon every shred of personal integrity to make money. 

These crooks and scumbags are the ones on the offensive, I believe. There are many good people with plenty of money. They are not the ones voting for Trump and supporting socially destructive, malicious measures of every kind, like more tax cuts for themselves.