All of My Boy Friends Were Boneheads

Not only am I wondering and aghast at the number and intensity of the assholes our society is producing I’m confronting the truth that a very high percentage of them are from my background. Were there always so many dicks in our societal closets or are they the product of more recent circumstances and trends? I think both, that there was untapped asshole potential and that there are more because circumstances tapped that potential.

Notice, anyway, how many of the supremely degraded individuals and sadists are Catholics. They are not only Catholics but from my hyper-competitive kind of Catholic background where winning was everything, presumably because it was existentially unimportant and limited to areas this side of salvation, but they’ve blown entirely through that distinction and allowed it to overrun their hope of eternal life and heavenly bliss. They sold their souls.

Witness: Bill Barr. Witness: Brett Kavanaugh and EVERY OTHER Supreme Court justice who votes consistently conservatively. They all have a degree of Catholic background though some have abandoned it over the cause of multiple marriages. Newt, always backwardsly progressive, became Catholic AFTER multiple marriages, culminating in his latest temptress receiving a Vatican appointment. She’s ambassadress, qualifying by adultery.

Witness: Fox News, the soul of which is Catholic, as attested by the ranks of scurrilous Irishmen and such manning every other post there. Kellyanne Conway is a perfect thug-ette. In any case, I look back on a childhood I once considered normal with horror. I recall the bullying and brutality. I recall the willingness and drive to win, by cheating if necessary, if not by a preference for its grander humiliating capacities. I recall going to mass and praying to kick ass.

A guy from those days whose family were the self-appointed bullies and tormentors of my family called me recently from our high school reunion—I’m convinced, to try to gloat—after 40 YEARS of no contact. He seems to think he has won. He was an amazing asshole in high school and insanely competitive. My family had been taken down by sickness, mental-illness and, ultimately, death. Still, every time I saw them back then, by chance encounter, it was criticism, slights and cruelty.

Trump helps us to understand, that there is no “victory” for them but only the primal pleasure of vindictiveness and acts of cruelty. My sister, a brilliant girl loosed from a home with no meanness in it or even hardness, was destroyed by the viciousness of one of the family’s daughters. As late as my brother’s wedding, years after I had seen any of them, a younger sister recounted an episode humiliating to me and touted her brother.

What the fuck? Can some people not comprehend that others don’t play their game? Again, Trump comes to the rescue. Through the impenetrable irrationality, small-mindedness and compulsion of his vindictiveness we can see the truth, about the fragility of his underlying psyche, while acknowledging, of the necessity of survival, his incredible powers of destruction. He could wipe out the whole world and not give a shit. That is inconceivably sick.