Beyond the Paywall

Where your government resides ...

The Trump Trajectory

This is the Trump trajectory. He fucks everything up beyond belief, gets scared as shit and attacks. Huge losses. Who will bear them? To a greater degree than ever, because of his position, anybody but Trump. 

High Plains Grifter

Trump rides into town. He's an outsider, rough around the edges, but he'll straighten everything out. He'll eliminate all the decency with corruption. Wasn't that what you wanted? 

Trump Bites

Trump was never domesticated. Dogs that bite are trained out of it or put down. Trump needed to be trained or kenneled. He's feral. Too late now. 

No One Is Safe

In the intimidation game, go big and go arbitrary. Attack someone prominent. Attack someone random, ideally innocuous. The message is, no one is safe.

Republicans on the Attack

Fucking people up isn't enough. You have to be seen fucking people up, as exaggeratedly as possible. Be a misanthropist they name something after. An airport? The Rand Paul Memorial Burial Mound, maybe. He'll steal an Indian one.

Perhaps occupy it, eventually. Why wait?

Be epochal. Momentous. Apparently Homeric, to be timely. Good has been done. Behaving is bathetic. Building is boring. Rationality isn't creative. It's all been done. Devastation is cool. The world is built out. Blow it up. Be the blitz.

Make a name for yourself. Blow it all up. 

Live Raid

Republican plundering emergency status notification. Looting is reaching a crisis level. Take cover. 

Nice Work but You Can't Get It

I want one of those Republican jobs. You get paid like crazy but you don't do shit. Or, you do do shit. They shit on everything and get paid for it. You have to pledge allegiance to Trump. I'm not going to do that. 

Don't Fence Me In

The freedom crowd wants to corral everything. They have boundary issues. Not that they don't have them, but the foundations are weak. 'Build the wall.' Their freedom is fragile so they demand certainty. 

No ambiguity. Everything is defined, fixed, immutable.

Existential certainty, in the limiting case. They are saved. They are going to heaven. They are patriots. Their worldview is right. See, it's the only one out there. They banned all the others. 

Wiped them out. What do we actually know? 

One real certainly, diversity is stability. They want a weed-free lawn of white men, the most unstable thing imaginable, requiring enormous energy subsidies to create and maintain. Hence the oil.

Apart from fencing everything they want oil. Which means excursions, to go get it. Plunder. They're actively doing this. Boundaries for me, not for thee. Also they want to corral meaning. 

To define reality, which they're scared of.

They're scared of the reality of themselves and their own weakness, mortality and imperfection. They can't see they're afraid of themselves, which they can't escape, so they go after everyone else. 

 

With bombs strapped to their asses. They are the apocalypse.

The forces of compulsion, the opposite of freedom.

Trump Baggage Bombs Iran

Trump is unloading his baggage on Iran ending up with more. I told him it wouldn't work. Call it the baggage paradox. Try to unload it and you end up with more. 

Trump doesn't understand. Psychological baggage piles up when you don't deal with it yourself. Trump is sitting on a mountain of it now.

Try This

Assume everything Republicans say is a lie and that everything they claimed to stand for going back decades was a lie. Voilà, the whole mess magically makes sense. All of it was always a fucking lie. 

The Hidden Truth: Outsider Identification on the Right

Conservatives FEEL themselves to be outsiders storming the gates of the deep state and attacking the inefficiencies Democrats created with their abuse of the public trust. They're wasting your money all over, Republicans say. 

Which I dispute in comparison with the unparalleled profligacy of Trump's administration. The reality underlying the outsider identification of Republicans is they never accepted the legal framework of the country to start.

Fair enough. Change it constitutionally.

The hidden truth is they never accepted the state's validity but were working for factional and partisan interests, firstly for the rights of rich people and fuck everyone else. They are monarchists. Kleptocrats. Oligarchs. Flirty Fascists.

And other things. But they aren't patriotic. 

I don't judge them, they judged themselves. Where do they get off saying rich people are treated unfairly? It's a scam. A scam masking the intention to overthrow the state and reinvent the country as a rich man's playground. 

They ARE outsiders, because they are culture-war combatants. 

January 6 wasn't a one-off. It was war against the state.

Which the Republican Party endorsed and officially signed up for. 

Making them enemies of the country they pretend to support. 

Game of Thrones

Trump's latest executive order 'Protecting the American Mind' corrects history and protects all citizens from the horrors of the truth. Why dwell on that shit? Trump is the shepherd and we are the sheep. Let him lead. Americans must not feel bad or suffer shame and anxiety, let alone over woke ideology and DEI and bad weather and the devastating knowledge that fossils fuels will run out one day and the rich people will have to kill millions of us to live the way they want and deserve. 

Also, Trump won every election and is incapable of losing. When he ascends into heaven he will win there and be further privileged and recognized by Jesus and God as the most holy and best person ever created and a fellow God. He will sit at the right hand in a golden throne at least as nice as Jesus's or God's he never quite understood that triune shit. Everything is gold. Surely Trump's throne will be nicer and bigger. I mean, who is this Jesus and who is he to hold a candle to Trump?

He got hung on a fucking cross. Trump, the great glory-basker, likes people who didn't die on a cross. Twelve apostles? What kind of a posse is that? Trump was president of the most powerful country ever. Heaven is kind of vacant, apart from those thrones. Have they not seen the White House? What splendor! Getting back to the thrones, Trump's must be bigger or he will bomb Iran. And why more than one? Since when? There will be one throne in heaven and Trump will be on it. 

This is a digression from 'history' but an important and natural one. We must think ahead to a time after the Ascension, when Trump goes to see Lindsey who was, he wants it noted, his underling. Everyone was his underling. Did they see his jets? Huge! And not one but two! Can heaven really contain Trump's magnificence? We must consider it so we can prepare for the Ascension. Roman emperors became Gods. The Supreme Court has declared precedent, I'm told, in anticipation. 

The throne thing. There will be one and Donald on it. He will make a deal. Eradicate Sharia Law, whatever makes God happy. Are there tariffs in heaven? These questions will be addressed for a smooth transition. Honestly, it's a takeover or buyout. In a pinch Trump will resort to blackmail. Blow up the earth with all those little people God supposedly loves if God doesn't accede. What is it about little people and that shit? They are nothing. Things will be different when Trump is God. 

Under What Circumstances?

Under what circumstances does Trump's destruction of the country make sense? It makes sense if it's the culmination of a Republican movement that was already in place. It makes sense if the two parts of the Republican coalition, rich, laissez-faire capitalists and disaffected, mostly evangelical white southerners, both want it. It makes sense by having happened. 

Both those groups want to see the country destroyed in some way. Evangelicals wanted crazily restrictive social changes. Outlaw abortion. Racist everything dressed for deniability. Rampant privatization. Their hopes and expectations changed as their grievances were validated over the years. They were fed vague promises that their revanchist dreams would be fulfilled. 

Rich, laissez-faire capitalists had been using them for their votes and stoking their anger but not giving them the crazy shit. They began to take it. Then the big change. The rich began to warm to the apocalyptic crowd. Not the crowd, really. They didn't want rednecks, Proud Boys and bikers showing up at their houses for cocktails, but there was 'disaster capitalism.'

'Creative destruction' was floating around in their realm of opportunistic, money-making ideas. And they want more money. 

They warmed up to catastrophism on the heels of the Great Recession they created and came out of not only unscathed but generally enriched. Enter Trump, an amazing criminal who had to have complete separation from any context of accountability. The average super-rich person might have wanted that, nobody telling them what to do or even making them pay taxes.

Way beyond it, they ended up part of a criminal enterprise to subvert the legal authority and power of the U.S. government. Maybe passively. Average, highly affluent people I'm talking about here. We now have a unified political movement that has seized control of everything solely for purposes of destruction. They had been selectively changing laws in their favor. 

It became impossible to hold them accountable even when they did, sometimes flagrantly, violate the law. Instances come to mind. Democrats fought back with pool noodles. They have tried, and I'll grant it's hard to fight sociopaths, but when you keep getting beat and the system is failing and people are dying at some point you have to question your tactics. But, no. 

Identity politics, the same old shit. Which I support as necessary to a degree as a matter of policy, but if you keep losing leading with it as a political thing YOU FUCKING STOP. Win the election, enact the policies. Where are we now? We are fucked. We have lost to an unbelievable degree. And we had better get our heads out of our asses. The other side is playing to win at any cost.

They want the government functionally obliterated. To go to heaven or to stay out of jail. Some for both. 

America's Fart Health

America's fart health has been deemed excellent after a checkup involving a general assessment of frequency, potency and gross emissions. Also employed was an EAG, and Electrical Ass-o-Gram, to see if the internal, fart-producing components were in good shape. All was well and splendid.

The testing was initiated by reports of extraordinary activity. America was found to be in a fantastic state of anal gaseous generation. Those on the receiving end, the millions and millions of people being farted at and shit upon, were not happy at this news, that America was simply doing what came naturally.

Americans, it was seen, have become the biggest pigs in world history. 

And they have committed themselves to that path no matter what. Venezuelan oil is an example. You want it, you take it, because America is special and the rules don't apply to you. Iran has proved a tougher nut. Americans were high on their own farts when it came to that. And Iran is farting back. 

I love how you hate me.

Democrats are hating on Republicans, a natural outcome of abuse that further empowers the abusers. Republicans welcome it. It means their tactics are working. Not that condemnation doesn't have its place, as a unifying force providing focus among the abused and as defining the nature of the resistance.

But it must translate into understanding and then action. Hate can't be helped faced with such injustice. Let's make it into a positive force. Let's make it count. 

Trump's Reversed New Testament: Tribalism Returns

So, the Old Testament was tribal but it made the king subject to the law. It established the supremacy of the law, which came from God. The New Testament extended it to all of humanity, initiating Christianity as a religion that was about behaviors, adherence to laws and standards and not belonging or tribal membership, universally and among all of humanity.

Universality was a natural and needed development and evolution, implied by the character of the law as natural law. Republicans reverted to tribalism, asserting that behaviors didn't matter, that laws were illegitimate constraints on human freedom, and fuck you. Now they're demanding and asserting universal tribalism, as perverse and self-contradictory as it sounds. 

Not content with being tribal assholes, they want worldwide tribalist assholedom, decency must be eradicated everywhere, being an insult to their worldview. No law, no standards, life is shit. 

Into this steps Donald Trump who is recognized as the King of the Losers and someone with the magical touch. Everything he touches turns to shit, a gilt turd still being a turd. Democrats think an awakening is possible on the right. It really isn't, as a matter of principle. They want everything to be shit. They will have to be swimming in shit for a change of heart to occur. 

Maybe not even then, by which time it is too late anyway. This is the new compact with God being proposed. We'll see what God has to say, assuming God exists. Meanwhile it's life in the sty. 

He's a Soul Man

Donald Trump doesn't have a living soul, an adjunct of which is having a conscience, but he's a soul man. Freed from the constraints of being normal and giving a shit about anything, Trump taps into the animal nature that remains, all that there is of him, to appeal to the animal nature in everyone.

The animal aspect can be dis-integrated from intelligence and decency, Trump's call of the wild.

Don't answer it. Whatever we are, and I don't claim to know, we are more or less than animals if only in our power. More, if we accept the responsibilities of our station. We are worse and less than animals if we fail and refuse, a rogue and unworthy component of creation, inhabiting the land of MAGA.

Sarah Huckabee Sanders and Sharia Law

Sarah Sanders' ridiculous, idiotic worry about the nonexistent threat of the implementation of Sharia Law in America shows us her own degraded, inbred Arkansas agenda, the imposition of Christian Nationalism or religious law in place of the secular legal system. She sees Sharia Law as the competition.  

Both represent the desire for fascist, autocratic, tyrannical religious government. 

This means the destruction of the United States, a secular nation that enables and encourages religious freedom. The morons are pulling it off because destruction is easy. Okay, they're good at it. Tearing everything down is their only talent and all they're capable of. They are the original Nazis. 

The Nazis took their inspiration from southern conservatives. They got their racism from them. And the brutal, inhumane, exploitative laissez-faire economic doctrines of American conservatives trashed the world economy and put the Nazis in power. They're the ticket if you want your life to be shit.

For this purpose they hired Donald Trump, a piece of shit that puts the world to shame. 

Shame Is a Bitch

MAGA is getting rid of its massive reservoir of dishonor by destroying the context that contains it. The shame of their racism, their corruption, the Civil War, segregation, desegregation, fucking country music and NASCAR and the entire pathetic, shit culture of whining, self-pity, false bravado, sin and decay.

They are such fantastically fucked-up and unworthy degenerates the one way out is to destroy all decency and standards, burning everything to the ground. They'll get us all killed to unload their disgrace. 

Making a Run at Unconstrained Evil

For the record, Trump and his gang are going for the full unconstrained evil thing. Those are the stakes. Impunity. Immunity. They can do whatever the fuck they want to anybody. They'll not only do it to make a point they'll go beyond that. Overreach, to establish their dominance, as with the ICE shit. They are not fucking around, but they're a mess so there should be opportunities to stop them. And Democrats are totally unprepared. 

Fuck Y'all

The Republican movement in two words, 'fuck y'all.' Southern white people never signed on to the American state thing, formally. They went along on their own terms. Slavery, then apartheid. 

Desegregation was the last insult. The war was on, again. This time they won. Dishonorably, as always, because the cause is racism and injustice. States' rights is up for argument, as far as I'm concerned. 

I don't care. Democrats who think what they say means anything or that they stand for anything but some brutal, insane fundamentalist shit are wrong. They want to destroy you. 'Fuck you' is all of it. 

The World Is Burning

The world is burning and Republicans are thrilled. Their plan is working. Their desires fulfilled. They came to destroy, so everything is going great. They are celebrating and cheering it on. 

Straight from the Pit of Hell to Your House

That's the thing, people don't expect a vampire to show up in their Sound of Music movie and chomp on the necks of the kids, so they can't take it in when it happens. But it has. America's rich are parasites and vampires. Trump and company are sucking the blood out of everything. 

America Declares Moral Bankruptcy

Every day the Trump insanity goes on America is declaring its moral bankruptcy to the world. They've reacted and are waiting to see if we pull out of it. They haven't foreclosed yet but they will. 

Crime and Punishment

Insider trading is Trump's latest favorite activity. His administration runs on corruption. Then they punish us. Our existence is a threat to them. Standards are a threat to them, so they must be eradicated and fear instilled everywhere. No one can be left who dares challenge them. 

Mad King Donald

We've got a king, Mad King Donald. And his reign of terror. Democrats gave us 'all we have to fear is fear.' Mad King Donald and his spineless supporters give us 'all we have is fear.' 

Democrats, remember where we came from. A fair shake for everyone. Fight for it. We were great then. Good, in any case. Republicans want to destroy it, America's heart and decency. 

Homie That Trashed Spain Suddenly a Fan

Trump, the homie that's been trashing Spain and most recently threatened to cut off all trade, suddenly found his inner fan while wishing Franco were back and they were a dictatorship. Then he could play ball in his preferred way, mano a mano with a fellow autocrat. He wants a dictatorship for everyone. No other form of government makes sense to him. 

Trump Dishonors Dead Soldiers

Donald Trump is dishonoring dead soldiers by claiming he's retaliating on their behalf, of some such shit. Let's get it straight. Trump never does anything for anyone but himself. The whole war is his. The fucked up economy is his. The ICE murders are his. The hundreds of thousands of deaths caused by what he did to USAID is his. Explosive diarrhea is his. Measles is his. The desecration and destruction of our national monuments is his. Attacking renewable energy is his. Creating a Supreme Court supermajority of political hacks is his. And that isn't all that's his, the miserable, psycho piece of garbage.

Headline USA: Trump Mistakes Personal Shit for Reality

Trump, never one to step outside himself, mistakes his personal shit for reality. He attacks Iran for nothing, because of his feelings of inadequacy and the grandiosity arising in denial and compensation, and relatedly his terrific need to belittle everyone sometimes with aggression and violence. 

And because it's his whim, which absolutely fucking sacrosanct. This is no way to run anything. The predictable result is a catastrophic mess which drives him further into fantasy so he screws up more and on and on. He's spiraling into massive personal failure and taking the country with him. 

 

Trump's personal shit is now reality.

Real Freedom Is Never Having to Admit You're Out of Your Minds

Republicans have a niche market, where the crazies live. When they say free they mean me, meaning them. Someone else pays the bills, someone else cleans house, and someone else feeds them, clothes them and wipes their filthy asses. 

No wonder Trump is their idol. Trump says you never have to grow up, that you can live like pigs and the world will still be there to exploit and enjoy, fuck the future and everyone else. Freedom to them is the opportunity to live irresponsibly. 

https://www.salon.com/2014/03/02/baby_boomer_humors_big_lie_ghostbusters_and_caddyshack_really_liberated_reagan_and_wall_street/

The Eternal Frame

A few titles from the Rich Person's Book Club I unearthed ...

1. How to Profit from the Death of DEI

2. Annihilating the Middle Class: the Money in Misery

3. Who Needs Workers We Got Bots

4. The Apocalypse as a Business Opportunity

5. Jesus is on Our Side: Social Darwinism for Believers

6. Memoirs of a Maker

7. Building a Bunker: Guide for the Compleat Idiot

8. The Imitation of the Antichrist

9. Making Money off Musk: Never Mind the Murder

10. Raising a Rich Kid to Win: A Motivational Guide 

11. The Whole Earth Epilogue

FedEx is a Fucking Mess

Rational regulation gives us companies that work. Profitable, responsible, good jobs, long-term success. Laissez-faire gives us plunder. Short-term profits and companies that are shit. 

FedEx is a southern company. An entrepreneurial company. FedEx runs on the plantation model. Screw the workers. Screw the customers, as much as possible. Take the money and run. 

Brigade de Trump

Trump is fortifying Washington. He won't leave. He's building his führerbunker. The Donnie Doctrine emerges from the ashes. Attack everybody. Steal everything. Make them come for you. 

He's going to fight it out. Little Donnie is going down with the ship. He'll take all of us and everything he can with him. Only that will give him the denouement he deserves, a big-ass final episode. 

Turd Weight

Trump is being flown all over at incredible expense. He recently flew two jumbo jets to Europe because, I guess, it takes that to encompass his magnificence. Whereas, I think he's about 250 lbs of shit, an eighth of a ton. Then it occurred to me there's no succinct, concise way of expressing a unit of Trump.

He is kind of a thing, just a big whatever, and between a pound and a ton I don't think there's anything. Maybe a kilo, but still a lot of space without a denomination so I propose, in honor of Trump, that 250 lbs be termed a 'turd weight' and became an official unit of measure. I've kept his name off not to offend. 

My Liberal Awakening

I was about 12. My father worked at Logistics Command at WPAFB. There was a cassette tape circulating there, of all places, he brought home that criticized our involvement in Vietnam, based on cultural knowledge. I don't remember specifics, but it argued we had no idea what the fuck we were doing. Dad had concluded, I believe, that Dayton might be the Siberia of the Air Force. Step on the wrong toes in Washington and there you go. The base, in any case, was impressive.

He said they got some brilliant people. He wondered what they were doing there. I thought there might be a hierarchy of Siberias. Anyway, I was an instinctively conservative kid but I wasn't stupid. The info in the cassette made me mad. And made me a lifelong liberal though I was a preservationist, interested in the old ways and cultural continuity. So, a weird mix. I would have identified as a Democrat because of Kennedy. I stayed a Latin Mass sort of preservationist but never bought the broad brush. 

Not after the cassette. I wanted to look deeper. I mistrusted positions backed by enthusiasm and emotional appeal. I hated unloading, putting your baggage on someone else and lighting them on fire. It infuriates me. I don't know where that came from. Again, I was 12. My rust-belt city was beginning to fail. The Catholic Church threw out Gregorian Chant for the most insipid guitar music ever. I remember arguing in grade school the National Guardsmen at Kent State needed to be considered, that they couldn't be that different from the students. Something went horribly wrong.

I felt incredibly alone. Maybe every kid does, I don't know, in their individual way. I disliked Nixon. More confusion. I couldn't understand how he got elected, but when he got caught I said we needed to own our role in it. We elected the fucker. Who did we think it reflected on? He won, a real landslide. A super-humongous, incredible, never-before-seen or to-be-repeated landslide by a certain standard. But, no, we needed to feel better about ourselves by making a bonfire out of Nixon. 

So I'm dying these days. Unloading is the new America. Bonfires worldwide. We were always vain, in an innocent, rah-rah, everybody-look-how-great-we-are way. Now it's horrible. Worst unloading I've ever seen. Calvinist, witch-hunt shit. Life-hating shit. Kill the messenger, his entire family, and blow his country to bits shit. Did somebody hurt our feelings? Awwww. We hurt our own feelings. We sensed an end to an imagined, idealized America and threw a tantrum not wanting to grow up. 

We're stuck in a frat house phase. Another thing, I evolved an attitude about the south. Confusion, bordering on bigotry. To my Catholic sensibilities something was off. I didn't like how southerners, like Lyndon Johnson, presented. I saw the preachers on TV, when that started, and thought, this is religion? As ever enthusiasm put me off. Unloading, self-righteousness and a lack of balance concerned me. And, in this puritanical context, their women went to church looking like prostitutes. 

Confusing! I ended up in the south. My assessment has been solidified. I understand now why the women dress that way and the makeup. I read books, by southern women. It's an expression of white male power. Of privilege. They don't work in the fields! You want to be as obviously, pretentiously far from that as possible. I wonder why. Somebody was happily working there on their behalf, we're told, and being treated very well. That's unloading at a structural level. Ask black people.

The whole country is the Confederacy. Read about the Confederacy. Notice the fixation on ownership. Property. Listen to black people. They're the experts. And stand in awe of the injustice. If it's a byproduct of something larger, like authoritarianism, or religious fundamentalism, or a hatred of creation that encompasses everything, the bigotry being a product of that because women and minorities are archetypally perceived as being closer to nature, then fine. But the interface, for us, is injustice. Horrific injustice, and it's the leading edge of the thing. 

Our conservatives aren’t conservatives. The country is innately liberal. Democrats are conservatives. Republicans are insane.

Semper Lie

The Trump Corps motto. 

Real Men Don't Wear Trad

Trad is for losers. Insecure men want submission. Real men don't wear trad. 

Intellectual Ferment

Conservatism rots brains, not that conservatives can't be clever. That's different. Fermentation might enhance that.

Trumpists Are Not Reflective

They're not philosophically inclined. Or they're vampires

I, Bacterium

Americans are about to show that in the most favorable circumstances imaginable, an Eden of natural beauty and fantastic resources, people will exhibit the brains of bacteria, competing for resources to the point of collapse. 

Beyond Blanche DuBois

The truth is trite. Two plus two equals four. Not fun. Two plus two equals sixteen is interesting. Two plus two equals Blanche DuBois is more interesting. It's creative. If there's a wild woods beyond Blanche DuBois Republicans are there. 

Casino Fatale

The casino economy has unusual stakes. You can lose your life. James Bond doesn't win, the good guys die, and you can't choose not to play. They roll the dice for you. Cue the music. 

Everything Goes to Shit

You can too. 

The ICE Chronicles

My father was a chemical engineer and then an industrial engineer. He taught management from the engineering end. He talked about businesses building a capability. What do we call it when the capability is destruction? The Nazis figured it out experimentally. Then they built camps. They built ovens. 

Still a capability. Republicans are building a capability. They've skipped some steps. Consolidated it. Intent is critical. And the willingness to use violence. Those are in place. The rest is evolutionary. Shit happening, like ICE murders and incarcerations, are a prelude to doing whatever the fuck they want.

To anybody. 

Republicans Were the Beneficiaries of Political Correctness

Republicans were the beneficiaries of political correctness. They'd been working for decades to overthrow the government. Democrats were too polite to call them on it.

Meanwhile they accused Democrats of everything, almost none of it true. The stuff was true of them. They defused accountability against them with attacks on Democrats.

Cunning fuckers. Democrats made them look brilliant. Destruction is easy. Preservation is hard. Building is harder. They didn't come to save or build. They came to destroy. 

Conservative War on America

It’s terrifying. More so because it's mostly unconscious, resisting repentance and reform. Racism is so personally toxic it got institutionalized so ‘good’ people could practice it, the Bible and Constitution suffering reinterpretation in parallel. The bigots rejected both but used them for cover. A couple of generations down the road the inheritors of the tradition are so buried in lies they have no clue, like the point Zwick made to you but with the urgency of denial because the racist material they’d embraced is radioactive. 

Mad Men stepped in, the marketing revolution replacing everything productive with, essentially, lies. Republicans rejoiced. They wouldn’t have to live in the leafy shadows of Newport and Greenwich anymore as a political matter and southern voters could be had for the beads and trinkets of racist innuendo. The woke people saw this. The politics were terrible but the perception correct, that the social conservatives were coming after everything, down to the universities, the last real institutional bastion of the left. 

Hollywood was about money, always to a degree, though some fought its influence. It wasn’t their fault where the money took them. There are good lies, called art, that they had sold in the past. Anyway, the Confederacy had been conditioned and primed to succumb to lies, a torrent or trickle, and we got both, frontal assaults and subtle manipulations, the frontal assaults predominating lately. Democrats are still on their heels, or asses, knocked so off balance they can’t see what happened, forget mounting an effective defense.

Even now, when the enemy has won and the country will have to be recaptured, Democrats can’t see clearly what has happened. I feel for them but the stupor of suburbanity mostly has them in its grip. Republicans are street fighters. Democrats studied how to run a country, as Lakoff points out, or watched West Wing longingly as it aged into irrelevance. Republicans studied how to win since they had no intention of running the country anywhere but into the ground. They can’t ‘get out of their story.’ They’re enslaved to it.

War of the Worlds

Trump's regime is in a war of death against life, including the destruction of their own humanity which they hate. We're a part of nature so they want to kill that too. It's a war of the worlds. 

Death envying life, an existential battle, not against individuals but individuation. A drive to absorb or annihilate all they can encompass, since life is meaningless, unintelligible and shit.

Make America Ass Explode

We aren't halfway through Trump's term, it seems like forever. The world feels immensely older. Trump promised a rebirth. It's a slaughter. Now America is shitting its brains out, courtesy of Trump. 

Run, Trump, Run!

I had a thought. Maybe people had been telling Trump for years to run because he was about to get his ass handed to him in another failed venture and Trump, in his obtuseness and unsurpassed vanity, thought they meant he should run for president. It was always a mistake! 

Will Success Spoil the USA?

It already did. We scammed ourselves. 

Love Is All Around

That's why we can't see it, sometimes. We're swimming in it. It glues life together. The glue can be taken for granted, however. Eve's failing, in my opinion, in the archetypal tale. 

Eve lost perspective. Girl, get a grip. You're in the Garden of Eden, and you get obsessed with the one thing you're told you can't have! Maybe most sin is taking things for granted. 

A interesting idea. Anyway, we can focus on the good, cultivate and encourage it. But because of Eve, or whatever, we must guard against the bad. We're living in the ruins of Eden. 

Still a beautiful place. Maybe more beautiful in its imperfection. 

Rugged Institutionalization

Rugged individualism was always a canard, innocent in its place. Vanity is everywhere, in a manner or degree. At the extremes it achieves escape velocity into unreality with the most dependent, subsidized and supported class claiming supreme independence, branding themselves 'makers,' and riding off into a mirage and hallucinated sunset of productivity and personal achievement. 

We Are the Barbarians

We always were. America has some great people. Responsible, intelligent, ethically gifted citizens, the best of us, appeared representative. They never were, but when they led the country it worked. 

The barbarian elements, concentrated in the south, were bonded by a shared bigotry and a revivalist, irrationalist, charismatic religion that legitimized  authoritarianism, apartheid and brutality. 

Fantastically Degraded White Man Lindsey Graham Is Dead

Leaves no children but grotesque legacy. 

Trump the Chicken

Little Donnie Trump is the most protected man on earth and he's scared to death. Call him a chicken. 

Can Trump Win the Nobel Peace Prize by Dying?

Finally, Saddam Trump might deserve his Nobel Peace Prize. By dying. Republicans, the FATH* party, will try to carry on killing. They love killing. But there will be a huge lapse in the power of hate in the world when Trump dies. That deserves to be recognized. Hail Trump! Thank you for dying. The best thing, the only decent thing, you ever did, ridding us of you. The world is finally united, in relief.

* Fuck America To Hell

Have They Tried Burping Him?

Has anyone tried burping Trump? He's old, he's ornery, he's overweight. We have to try it. I might be mixing his emotional age in with things, since in aspects he's stuck in infancy and babies need burping or they can get cranky. Trump is cranky all the time. The reasoning is solid.  

Who, for Christ's sake, would elect such a person? That was an aside.

It's hard to imagine how this wretch became president. Anyway, he looks gaseous as hell. That's evidence. Somebody try it. Be vigorous. Smack him on the back. Strange to think such a thing might mean life or death for millions. Might already have, Trump's dyspepsia and bloating. 

He hovers and moves like the Hindenburg. Burp the shit out of him. 

Rage Against the Machinators

I don't give a shit about the machines and their capabilities. Well I do, in a positive way when they're used to do good. But fuck the people who use them for ill. And they seem to be everywhere. 

Trump Tells America to Eat Shit

MAGA says thank you, we love it, we deserve it and bless you, Sir.

The Casino Is Bankrupt. Long Live the Casino!

The problem isn't Trump, if it ever was. He's fucked it up royally, again. The American casino is bankrupt. There's no daddy to bail him out. Run, Trump, run. 

He's his own banker, courtesy of crypto. We're at that stage when Trump goes bust and weasels his way out. He grabs the money, as much as he can, and runs. 

Queens Quixote

Donald Trump, Quixote from Queens, is actually attacking windmills. Real ones and imagined. The windmills are fighting back. And they're winning.

Every Day Is Massacre Day in America

Happy Massacre Day.

Only People With Guns Shoot People

Tell gun nuts guns are the problem and they will shoot at you. They say people are the problem. They proved both. Guns are the constraint. 

Gun nuts are also the problem. Only people with guns shoot people. Let them choose. Regulate guns or regulate gun nuts. Either is fine with me. 

Individual Lives Are a Roll of the Dice

You only find meaning in the aggregate. 

America Lost Its Mind So You Don't Have To

The world is learning from us. Electing your Id to run your country is not a good move. You can thank us later if we're still around.

Asshole Course of Action

Anyone else think the predominant and possibly only filter active in Trump selects for maximum asshole effects subject to ego gratification? The boy LOVES to fuck people around. Great man to make president, a professional troll and certified dick. 

State of Abnormality

Democrats have got to go big if they have the chance. Nothing piecemeal. Declare Trump's entire stint as president, both terms, illegitimate. He impeached himself, if with a bunch of abettors. Blow the whole fucking thing up. The Republican Party is the Confederacy. Traitors. The South has risen again. The stench of death is everywhere. 

I've Got to Be Me

No you don't. That can mean a failure of socialization. Maybe better to say you can only discover who you are in context. In community. 

Whoopee We're All Gonna Die!

I'm suggesting this as an alternative to 'In God We Trust' for monuments and coinage. Not as pithy, maybe, but I think it captures something of the evangelical spirit and American ethos. 

Moron Day

Maybe if we celebrated morons, gave them their due, they wouldn't try to rise up, take over, and get us all killed. Just a thought. 

War of the Worlds

Donald Trump is at war with the world, in revenge for being born. He's that damaged. He has allies, firstly an extreme, life-hating bunch of feral Calvinists that hate creation. Pentecostals. Somewhat unbelievably they are joined by a group of tech tycoons who have become catastrophists. 

They think societal collapse will play out well for them, never mind the carnage. They don't care. The tech tycoons are like brains suspended in a medium as was portrayed in a Star Trek episode. Alienation unites these factions in a war of the worlds. Life against Death. Love against Hate. 

Existence against non-existence, when it's modeled out, but not all of them will own it. The Calvinists might. They really hate everything. The corruption and imperfection of creation as they experience it makes them all mad, both pissed and crazy, so in both those senses of the word. 

Not to be discouraging but this is it. We didn't choose it but we are thrust into a battle of good against evil. The world of life against the world of death. Intelligibility against chaos. Cooperation against convulsion. We are called on to resist in an epic and battle that looks like bathos from the inside.

Third-rate characters like Trump. Even our villains suck but they kill you anyway. Satan is driving a clown car, but it's still fatal as hell. They will destroy everything and kill us by the billions and never look back. Big numbers are nothing to them or they like them. Psychopaths think big. 

Waiting for Answer

Evangelicals: we want collapse because Jesus comes.

Billionaires: we want a catastrophe because more for us. 

America: (waiting for answer)

Trump Universe

I can usually understand what Trump is trying to say, it’s just elliptical as shit. Lots of bits left out, but the guy is in his own world and not very smart, only driven to win and self-centered to such an extreme it probably would take a psychic or savant to comprehend it and they might not come back intact.

In the Hitchhikers Guide to the Galaxy there's a thing called the total perspective vortex that destroys you by enabling you to glimpse how REALLY insignificant you are for a split-second. Trump is the opposite, a total lack-of-perspective vortex. Inside there the universe is Trump. And Trump is the universe. 

Donald Trump, Debutante

Trump scammed himself. Unable to maintain his identity, weakly linked to reality on his best days, he has fallen for his own lies and is buying his own bullshit. Believing is madness, buying-in a catastrophe. We know from the study of the southern belle. Bellehood. 

It's a role. You play a role. You play the game. Don't step inside it, for fuck's sake, but no one can accuse Trump of any sense. I defer to authority, Shirley Abbott, in Womenfolks: Growing Up Down South. The point of a belle is to become a lady. God help you if you fail. 

Trump failed. Trump wanted to be prom queen. He got elected. He gloried in it. Things began to go wrong. Wrong by his standard, magical compliance with his every wish, Trump being infantilized beyond recovery. He felt disrespected. Heads must roll. 

The stage of retribution arrives. Vengeance. Think of the movie Carrie. And the correspondents dinner, where Obama made fun of Trump. Everyone gets it at those things, but Donald is different. Très fragile. Trump fumed. He was livid. He brings it on himself. 

Nobody makes fun of Trump! What a fucking idiot. We all must pay. So this is our country now. Watch the revenge scenes from Carrie on your own. Choose your version, it all burns down. This is Trump's story and the story of the south. The south wanted its dream. 

They needed to live the lie. Failure was unthinkable. Failure was growing up, the end of a vile system, voluntarily or otherwise. Otherwise it was. Still, they never gave up. The presentation of purity and innocence masked astonishing debasement and corruption. 

The USA now, with the monster, Trump, our embodiment and bastion of purity.  He carries the torch. The scepter. He wears the sash, Miss USA, Miss World, Miss Galaxy, Miss Cosmos, whatever he claims. The magic wand of lies and corruption makes it real.

But it's not real. It's nothing but lies. 

Leaning Tower of Trump

Trump is falling over. Get out of the way.  

Trump, the Musical

I envision a remake of The Music Man telling the story of Trump, a trickster, fraudster and hustler who concludes he is every outrageous, self-inflating lie he tells about himself. He falls for himself, or the idea and invention of himself because there's nothing there. Language fails us but I think we can portray it, as a matter of art. Love, for example, can't exist within the gravitational pull of Trump's egotism. 

I know, hard to get your head around. Trump is alone in the universe. 

Trump's self-centeredness -- again, language fails but work with me -- creates a draft, vortex or suction of such ridiculous force it swallows people instantly into the black hole of Trump's nothingness. We can't imagine it without reference to something or without meaning attached to it but we have to get past that. Meaning doesn't exist in proximity to Trump. How the fuck do we portray that? 

With negative space. We can infer the shape and substance of Trump from his effects, and the area of devastation around him. 

The things we value, love, family, our health, connection with nature, security, beauty, vanish into the void encountering Trump's influence. Their lack defines Trump. Vampire elements are in play, but vampires are intelligible. Reason, ethics, right and wrong -- vaporize on contact with Trump. Trump is a void. The currency among people is meaning, in my opinion. It's not the currency with Trump. 

Trump is an invitation to abandon your humanity and assimilate with him in the void. As I say, impossible to confront directly. I try to imagine Trump's aloneness. Truly, he is alone in the universe. Nothing means anything. Everything is terrifying and incomprehensible. Or, he doesn't know what intelligibility is. He's never experienced it. The fear is unfathomable, existential and all-consuming. 

He is so incredibly fucking alone. Now, to give you an example of a song, there might be a version of this some maiden sings to Trump before her humanity is destroyed, and then Trump singing a version 'Till There Was Me' after annihilating the maiden, which Trump sings to himself.

https://music.youtube.com/watch?v=zmt9d6zr0bs&si=I7JlSnhKQPMS65u-

Goldwater Girl Has a Gun

Democrats can't get their heads out of their asses. They humored the crazies too long. No, the Second Amendment isn't about the private ownership of firearms. It just isn't. Unprejudiced sources agree, nine of ten, at least. Hillary, stop saying you have a gun. Or a license, or whatever. You're not pulling it off. And I'm tired as shit of it, Democrats playing to the nutcases. 

That helps them stay nutcases. And that's only one issue. The list is long, maybe most impressively on defense. The military. Guess who Republicans are attacking now? Anybody they want, including American citizens. And we didn't take a stand, so people don't know what the fuck we're for. Maybe Bernie. But the Democrats wouldn't have him, or get clear on anything.

The Devil Wears Nada

The devil operates in stealth mode. We personify Satan but Satan infests his victims and co-opts them. Turns them into agents and drones. The devil wears nada. The devil isn't incarnate. The devil is a force. He'll be in the people around you. Having said that, I think Trump is hiding horns under the hair. 

A Confederate Fourth

They can't hide it. For one thing it's a compulsion. They say it's patriotic, unifying, bipartisan and blah-blah. Is that a joke? It's one cheapshot after another, and an exercise in tyranny. What is it, really? The consummation of the privatization of the government. Of the country. Conquest.

Republicans are the Confederacy. They own the country. Private equity firms buy companies, strip them of assets, saddle them with debt and say go and good luck. Leave your pensions. They skipped the good luck part. They are throwing a gargantuan party with our money, an orgy of corruption. 

And not only for the 4th. It's going on all the time. The country isn't ours. It's theirs. They own it. Bought it. Beat it. They own us. We wonder who 'they' are and analyze it down but screw that. The richest 1%? The richest tenth of that? Koch's cronies and Musk's minions? Name your torturers.

It's them, the NPCs, the mindless agents of doom Musk was after. He didn't find them. We found them. Smashing our doors down, hard to miss. It doesn't matter. What is a cheapshot? Kicking at people who can't fight back.  Sound familiar? We are the brown people. All of us. They are ICE.

No one nation under God. Never was. How will it be characterized, decades away? Think on that. We're inside of an explosion. This is what it looks like, from the inside.

An epic failure and enormous shitshow, but it doesn't matter. The coup, putsch, takeover, conquest, sacking, demolition, usurpation, whatever, but I wonder how it will be remembered anyway, Trump's mind-blowing graft and grift? The ICE surges? Everyone knows more is coming. 

A long summer awaits us. At the same time, it's over. It's done. Our country is gone. Law, values, integrity, traditions, up in flames. We handed inconceivable power to people whose corruption, venality, dishonesty and cruelty defy description. Or they seized power. It doesn't matter. 

Trump staged our funeral. An orgiastic episode, ann end to a looting in barbarian fashion. Rape, pillage, murder, repeat. Plunder on tape loop. Plunder to exhaustion, of resources or plunderers. 

We can't go back. Forward, folks. We are the generation that failed. Say it's the boomers, if it makes you feel better. It doesn't matter. The torch has been dropped. The country is dead. Those that carry what it was in their hearts will have to unseat the false heirs and traitors. 

And start over. It wasn't rational by any standard. They're settling a grudge, punishment for the Civil War and desegregation. So they will leave nothing. Salt the fields of democracy. Make it impossible to build on the ruins, if they can. Where there was integrity, cowardice and dishonor. 

Resurrect something, people. Acknowledge what has been lost, like a generational link that is broken when an abusive, addicted wastrel wrests control of the family estate and trashes it. We are the sons of liberty. They are the destroyers. Witness in Washington our utter disgrace. 

Decency is lost, in the aftermath of conquest. A celebration of a glorious victory. A party for a bunch of pigs, marauders and destroyers. The worst frat party ever. It's not us. It's the Confederacy. They've won, for now. Let's own it, what's happened, for once. And move on. 

The Force Is With Us

Why don't they just call him Lord Vader. Darth would do. Republicans are under a spell. In a cult. Part of a robot army. Call in the exorcist.

Almost Hell

 We're heading for Hell. Not there yet. The suspense is killing me. 

The Bell Tolls for Us

This had to happen. If we didn't know it before we know it now, that America has an undercurrent of evil going back to slavery, racism and a creed of greed, a religion of money and power that grew in parallel with Pentecostal Christianity. We never dealt with it. Those forces have risen up and are running the show. Calling it evil is not exaggerating. It is evil. They are evil. We, the opposition, hesitate to say it but we can because we are not tribalists and an identity cult. Which means we criticize behaviors. 

They can became un-evil. Someone can't became un-black or un-brown. That's the identity cult. We are being forced to own our evil. That's good. Canada is a model. Scandinavia is a model. Hell, the rest of the traditionally western, European countries are models in comparison with us. We made it easy. Trump is evil but he's sick. He's a compulsive. Non-compos by a normal standard. Lord Vader, Darth Donald, still a tool. We need to deal with the Death Star. The fatalities are rolling in. The bell is tolling for us. 

The Umpire Strikes Back

John Roberts has overthrown America's democracy. That battle has been lost. But the dream lives on. The forces of evil will be beaten in the end. 

Conservative Industrial Complex

Conservatism can't be separated from money. It isn't an ideology it's a business. It isn't a political philosophy it's a scam. It doesn't have an economic model it has justifications for exploitation.

Conservatism is the result of aristocratic desire. The desire to be at the top. The desire to stay at the top. The desire to have everything ordered your way to be revered and taken care of. To feel special. 

Conservatism is all lies. Conservatives want generational wealth and arbitrary authority that survives them. Authority that's structural and that they can pass on to their heirs. Hierarchy and inheritance. 

The Coddling of the Conservative Mind

Trump has exposed the scam of conservatism. They inhabit the upside-down. Where rugged individualists, the leaders and producers, need to have everyone get out of the way and yield. Though supposedly strong and unstoppable they must be unimpeded in their plunder or everything will fall apart. 

In the upside-down the most powerful people, the super-rich, aren't rewarded enough and must have more. The dominant religious group, Christians and especially conservative Christians, are persecuted. They are disrespected and denied free expression. They must have recognition as the state religion. 

White people are subject to prejudice. They are threatened and everyone else must go. Money and power, which conservatives already have, are their own justification. By divine right or natural law, take your pick. The status quo, which favors conservatives, is sacred. It must not be challenged. 

The law and prisons protect these interests from the rabble. That underclass, most of humanity, are a burden. Sometimes a nuisance. They are tolerated if required for their labor or as soldiers or servants and enforcers, but they are otherwise disposable. Technology is making them useless. 

They had better behave and revere their masters or they will be eliminated. God is on the side of conservatives and probably a conservative Himself. Times have changed, it's hard to say. But power is an expression of divine will, in the way the universe is made. Play your part or you will be removed. 

The News Today, Oh, Boy

The world is burning. America is shit. Trump is getting rich. 

Trump Ruins Nation's Big Birthday

Fantastically spoiled, vindictive narcissist Donald Trump has ruined the nation's big birthday. He did everything wrong but mostly it was partisanship and his huge, pathetic, insatiable ego. No one can imagine him behaving otherwise. It is who he is. 

Go Fourth

Trump's July 4th festival is as it had to be, a celebration of America's demise and the triumph of the Confederacy. Private property defined the Confederacy. Black people can show up to public stuff. 

It was always about exclusion. Trump's turnout, and everything else, heralds the new way. Nothing is ours. It's theirs, the people who own it. The people who own us. Every day it's more literally true. 

The Last Temptation of Trump

In evangelical minds Trump surpasses God because he is manifest. As manifest as they come. God is abstract. Evangelicals claim a 'personal relationship' with Jesus, as though that's in the Bible, but does Jesus have a Qatari 747? Fuck no. Is Jesus a crypto billionaire? I don't think so.

Trump is manifest. He's the most manifest person ever. Un-fucking avoidable. Combine that with the abilities of evangelicals at discernment. They know a Jesus man when they see a Jesus man and Trump is a Jesus man. They know it's accomplished through their acquaintance, the Holy Spirit.

They are confidants since evangelicals have been saved. Evangelicals know Trump will triumph over temptation because he has. In on Oscar Wilde kind of way, we might say, but still. Trump has conquered temptation, by having no conscience. That is his superpower. Which is convenient. 

You can do anything, being beyond sin. It's good to be God.

It follows that Trump is the Second Coming or something. Evangelicals challenge us, prove otherwise. The Trump Deportation Inquisition goes on. He is without sin, by design since he is God or God's hand and herald, an agent of purification who has had salvation bestowed on him. 

Trump is a fisher of men. He kills those that won't bow to him, on authority from God. Your local evangelical church can explain it to you. Or not. ICE is standing by. You didn't think they would stop with immigrants, did you? You weren't listening. You weren't paying attention.

They are not fucking around. God is on their side.

Who are the idolators now? Who is enslaved to superstition?

I knew Catholics were accused of idolatry and superstition by some Protestants. Of being degraded and undignified. Of misunderstanding how God had made us, as reasoning beings, and of what God wanted and expected from us, as reasoning beings and uniquely as an element of creation. 

Who are the idolators now? Who's superstitious and degraded? Who is bowing before a charlatan and a buffoon who clads everything he can get his hands on in gold and has grifted his way through a life of preying on everyone he could, sometimes apparently for sport. Those Protestants. 

People need balance. They need reason and they need a place for story and imagination. The senses must be engaged. Those Protestants were deprived of Christian art. Rich religious experiences that were emotionally and humanly satisfying. So they fell for shit. They fell for Trump. 

And they fell from grace in the bargain. Since it's a bargain they made with the devil.