How Do You Say "Asshole" in Aramaic?

More often than not, when I start to write something, I have no idea where I'm going with it. The other day it occurred to me that Judas is a good example of Puritanism in the Bible. He's the Bible's version of an evangelical Christian or right-wing nut.

Judas is self-righteous, self-serving and, well, a jerk. He's small-minded, judgmental, miserable, petty and mean. He's a hypocrite. Alright, he's an asshole and, in the end, a traitor. How does this not describe our conservative fellow countrymen?

What sticks out to me is the baiting--such an annoying trait, even for a traitor. You would think treason would trump everything, but not for sheer annoyance. It's hard to feel for a principle, the way you would, say, about fingernails on chalkboard.

And the baiting goes on and fucking on, just forever. It's not even satisfying to see George Will get the full-blown asshole treatment from O'Reilly. I want to say "where have you been, George?" Did he think he would be spared? But O'Reilly's our asshole.

You might say. He's on our side. He's a line of defense against the bad shit. A warrior doing the necessary dirty work. No, he is the bad shit. He's a traitor. He's an asshole, and it's interesting to see the type, the rogue insider, well-represented in the Bible.

Beltway Bush People

Washington is full of primates and aborigines, practitioners of the ancient and honored ways of foraging, taking in as much as they can with as little effort as possible, becoming as bloated and carefree as a pasha can be. 

There is so much there, good and plenty, easy pickings with the fruit hanging low in the trees. Witness the crowd of the seekers of the garden of abundance that puts forth without work, where you can truly live for free.

Ruination's Revelers

They're loving this. You ever get that feeling, with creeping discomfort, because, let's say, the event is the deaths of many people? Welcome to the new reality of Republicanism, and their real reaction to the Paris attacks. 

They love it. The reaction is real, but the deaths are not real to them. The dead are Republican funny money: fake, expendable and cheap. What does it take to get through to these people that the deaths are real? 

It's their realm of unreason, a slow-motion apocalypse they are willing into existence. Yes, they are that crazy. On short analysis there are two aspects to it: the denial of what's real and their choice of an alternative, parallel world.

Obliteration. Death. Picture zombies with blood dripping from their mouths and after more gore. Ye Gods, it's Ann Coulter! Laura Ingraham! The Newtster tweets in. Argh! Forgive the panting. I'm running as fast as I can. They're after us!

Dumbasses

I recall reading, in grade school, about the American Revolution and the Americans shooting at the idiot British, marching in formation, from behind trees. I was so proud and pleased, as only a boy-child can be, at the killing and how we were smart and the Redcoats dumbasses.

Who are the dumbasses now? 

To Be Pure

In one if my favorite, ever, short interviews, Carlos Fuentes, when asked by Deborah Solomon about being an atheist in Mexico, said that in Mexico even the atheists are Catholic. Similarly the soul of America is Puritan, the distorted spirit of Salem. 

The Feminists are Puritan. Gays are Puritan. Even a lot of Catholics are Puritan. How can you tell? Puritans are judgmental, idealistic, humorless and self-righteous. Their idealism is utopian. The standard is an impossible ideal of piety and purity.

They aspire to perfection so they take whatever they have for granted, The glass is always half empty. I knew older gay guys who were thrilled not to be beaten up and bothered all the time. The younger guys want everything. Fine, but get a perspective.

Remember how lucky you are. Is there a model Puritan in the Bible? Well, there's Judas. When Mary Magdalen washes the feet of Jesus with perfume at the home of Lazarus, Judas finds fault with the waste. The money could have been given to the poor. 

This is Puritanism: the inhuman standards, the lack of balance, understanding and reasonableness. They are fastidious with everyone else, jealous, and always applying a critical eye. Puritans are inconsistently scrupulous and unfairly exacting.

Life is too damned imperfect for them. Too messy. No wonder we are so screwed. We are witch-hunters, always on the lookout for imperfection, and oblivious to our own. Puritanism is antithetical to life, in always striving to be beyond its limitations.

A View from an Asshole

Increasingly the Republican view of the world is that of tail-gunner Joe McCarthy, from the ass-end of an airplane, struggling to see the enemy through shit-smeared goggles, unaware of the forward momentum of the plane, it's progress, plan or destination. 

All of that is above his pay-grade and abilities. He is there to shoot stuff down as part of a mission of destruction, But, wait, everyone else has parachuted into Shangri-La, or Wichita, and he discovers he is alone in the plane. Still, something must be attacked.

He is an attacker, a mindless missile, no matter the rest of the crew is now drinking daiquiris by a pool, having forgotten Joe, the idiot underling, who doesn't know that the class war is over and won. Even henchmen get their reward, a bone or two from the table.

Wait, again, a target has come into view, an oasis of ease and degradation, a place for retired mercenaries, tax-avoiders, under an unfamiliar, pirate flag. Bombs away! Joe sees the glint of the pool as he peels away from daiquiri-land. They never knew what hit.

Stuck in the Middle with Me

I have had two close friends kill themselves. You hear about the guilt associated with that and, I don't know, but for me a story had ended and I was still stuck in it. It frustrated a sense of appropriateness that has to do with whatever it is in us which wants to make things into stories. 

It was left to me to hold the bag, as they say, to go on living as though it made sense to go on living in the same circumstances, an insult somehow to what had happened. It would have made more sense to me to wake up in a cell with Dustin Hoffman in PAPILLON, eating bugs and shit.

Then I could have felt that one story had ended and that I had been reborn, somewhat, into a new and fresh life and that it wasn't disrespectful to my friends to carry on, but I was stuck in the middle, in a life too changed and not changed enough. The other way to get there is a length of time.

That was the way for me and it took a hell of a while. And I was lucky. Some people are wounded in such a way that they never come out of it. Some don't even know that there is an "out" to come out into. I ache for them. And I ache for anyone beset by a burden of circumstances.

I Have the Answer

(I'm waiting around now for the self-fulfilling thing to kick in)

Enter the Dragon

I live in a college town. There are vestiges of the old ways, when most of the professors went to church but were mainly academics and the church-centered people, the faith crowd, loved the University for what it was, many things at once, a complement to them and a challenge in some areas and respectfully independent in others. And, oh, the sports.

Enter the Dragon. Somewhere in there the faith contingent, acting out of insecurity, declared war on the universities. God must be the center of everything and, well, they'll fire your ass if you don't agree. Surely, no, you might think, they wouldn't be that brazen and crazed. Google "UNC, Tom Ross." They fired his ass and that was only the beginning. 

They will fire your ass and any other asses they want if you disagree with them. It's their way. What the hell was wrong with it before, in the situation I described, when everybody all kind of got along? Nothing, of course. Remember, these are the people who gave you the Civil War and segregation, evangelical Bolsheviks. There's more of that to come.

Do You Believe in Magic?

I want me one, whatever magic wand the Republicans have which, together with the fairy dust, turns deficits into manna from heaven and wrenching economic hardship into the money-making version of a perpetual motion machine. Poof! And I mean poof with a capital "p" and that rhymes with "b" and that stands for something. Not "something." Maybe "bullshit."

Ah, the hidden connections. The mystery. There's a whole universe there and I know it because it is true and revealed to me and besides that Tinder-bell is flitting around, between sexual liaisons, and all the other signs are there as well, as we are in the realm of divine dispensation where the good shit flows up out of the ground like oil from a well you didn't even have to drill. 

The darkies or someone drilled it for you. Drill on, baby, drill on. Praise Jesus for all the goodness that comes from nowhere when you believe, as you must believe, as you must agree, as you must toe the line and unanimously consent and profess it and witness with wonder to the fantasy world of free shit. Or maybe it's just the end-times. Oh, my, wouldn't that be cool! 

This is Your Chance

It is time. Act now before it's too late. 

Let's Spend the Night Together Next Week!

With some things immediacy matters. It brings with it a sense of urgency and emotional investment. You would think that seeing your country wrecked by crazy people would qualify. 

Where is James Bond When You Need Him?

WORLD DOMINATION. What kind of a nut wants world domination? It seems to me you're just a big target with nowhere to go but down. Wait, I think that's us, the world's only remaining superpower. It was such a short time ago when all we wanted was not to be dominated ourselves. So we said.

Now the world is our living room. Our lebensraum. We go where we want and do what we want. We don't even think to ask why we're here, there and everywhere. We need the resources. We need the security. How, exactly, are we endangered? How have we not had our share of the goods?

But we're somehow different from everyone else. So we think. We're special. The standards don't apply to us. The rest of the world is so reassured, I'm sure. Let them ask God, if they have any questions. Just as an idea imagine us without military installations all over the place, and in space.

Man, it would save a lot of money. We could then try to live on our own resources or those fairly bartered for. Then, maybe, we could look to our own, see to our own people and our own problems, which we manifestly have. Imagine it. Would we be less secure? I don't think so, but ask Dr. No.

Near Death

My reaction, when I first encountered someone undeniably under the control of unconscious drives, was not "you monster" but, at first, amazement. Then I thought that I might have similarly repressed stuff, because I must, but to a lesser degree, I hope, because the person was nuts.

This is my way, to look for the underlying core of common humanity, and then the differentiation on top of that, probably more of each than we can see. Extreme cases reveal things to us, and about ourselves, which is why I so often use interpolation, interplay and averaging, a kind of dialectic.

Too much. Not enough. Too much. Not enough. You come out in the middle, which, it is to say, with respect to the drives, that we only make sense as a people, as a species, averaged and aggregated. We are incomprehensible in isolation. You can't understand anybody out of context.

So I judge everything with a low-grade level of wry restraint, respecting those unconscious drives, since you never know how much they're in play. That awareness keeps the drives in check, the experts say, and enables the more integrated elements to run things. Now, consider near-death experiences. 

It's as unconscious as you can get, to be clinically dead. There are lessons there, whether you believe in the afterlife or not, and people come back from those as flaming, foaming liberals. They are nice to everybody and live with compassion and acceptance and happiness in the little things.

Contrast that with certain non-liberals. Oh, let's not. I don't have the heart for it right now. But it does make you want to freeze some folks, induce near-death experiences in them, and try to turn them into caring, civilized beings, capable of living in harmony and peace with everyone else.

All We are Saying... Is U-up Your Ass!

To everything there is a season. Playing nice with the right-wing crazies hasn't worked. It's time for confrontation.

Nerf Sword at a Knife Fight

Certainly since the days of Bob Shrum the Democrats have been bringing a nerf sword to a knife fight, and it goes much further back, though seeing Shrum's candidates skewered by Lee Atwater was such a spectacle, American politics at the low ebb at which it remains.   

Atwater got well nerfed and Shrum was left pricked and stunned, but what do we care. Somewhere in there it became clear that the knife side in the fight didn't still believe that we are all on the same team, all Americans and deserving of a voice and the assumption of good will.

The Atwaterites remain ascendent on the Right and the standing insult to Democrats continues, as they run around brandishing their nerf weapons. America struggles and staggers on, in the care of people who are great at winning elections and terrible at everything else. 

Bad Shit

Occasionally I glimpse the deep, inner workings of the soul of a southern white man and know that we are doomed. They say that emotional injuries suffered early enough in life can play out horribly because they aren't objectified and understood as incidents but construed existentially.

Or, in another parlance, archetypally, as manifestations of a world of primal forces of mythological cast, where everything is fraught with sinister import and significance. So a sickness or injury isn't that but an indication that the world is always offering up annihilation, extinction and oblivion.

Slavery is America's early childhood injury. It's the thing that we process archetypally and can't objectify or see for what it is, a massive moral fuck-up but still an incident, a thing that happened, the consequences of which can be addressed rationally and directly rather than by analogy.

The souls of southern white men, driving their brains from the archetypal regions, take them to libertarianism and other laundered versions of the same old racist crap, white male power and privilege, with property being pivotal, as in the distinction between owner and owned, slave and free.

In this analogical, parallel world of hobgoblins and bogeymen and red herrings everything is processed unconsciously and partially, as a means of evasion and avoidance. So the Confederate flag, for example, isn't racist when it is, voting rights aren't diminished when they are and so on.

This is morally corrosive stuff, since it cracks the door to a world of wishful thinking, defensiveness and unreason, a world which is most likely accepted as real because the true source of the fear, being unaddressed, will always find other homes, like an illness propagating itself among hosts.

Hippies

Something has triggered a couple of intense dreams for me lately. The last one, apart from a lot of unrelateable strangeness, had me somehow winding up in a neighborhood of sorts which turned out to be an informal community of hippies and lefties and somewhat disorganized, impractical people.

Do you notice an air of judgement in that? Well, it was there in the dream as well and I got schooled on it, being confronted with my own sense of superiority. We must all have some of this but I am, in fact, pretty judgmental. I have always identified with authority and loved standards and structure. 

I think I'm comfortable with that generally but that, in times of stress or confusion or vulnerability, those deep attributes which define us to some degree can become our enemies, by being too extreme and becoming a way of protecting ourselves by being less free and open in our daily lives. 

By being more compulsive and determined, that is. I have always been an energetic, creative, improvisational person. Can you see it in my writing? I think the love of structure and standards is connected to that, to keep me from flying off into space, kind of, in some sort of semi-ecstatic state. 

Anyway, I recall feeling superior to the free-spirits in that informal community and I think it's just the fear of my own freedom, that I'm more like them than I think. Late in the dream some beautiful young women started dancing loosely in the street, on their way back from shopping or somewhere.

It looked right out of Isadora Duncan. It was beautiful and such a simple expression of everyday joy. "Joy." These words don't serve us well, sometimes. Whatever it was it was essential, like food, in the dream, or more likely inevitable, if someone lives fully inside of their humanity, without fear. 

I doubt I'll move to that community, in my head--it doesn't live anywhere else--but I'll take my practical self there and befriend them, maybe helping them build something, and they will admire me for my practicality and I them for helping me dance spontaneously a little more, if only in my dreams.

Forbidden Planet

I have returned, after a lengthy lapse, to remake a movie on Republican lines, Forbidden Planet. I can't, however, seem to get past casting, and not for want of good candidates. There are far too many to start. Help me here. I can't picture anyone but Lindsey Graham as Robby the Robot. Would he work?

In the crucial role of Dr Morbius we have to evaluate the insidious ids of some scary characters and I fear I may not come back from that intact. We will cast him on the basis of the id alone, whose is darkest and deepest and most representative of irrational, right-wing fears. There are monsters there.

The monster itself is easy. It's Hispanics, Muslims and other vessels, made-up as carriers of the inner, repressed nastiness of the collective id of conservatives, embodying all the aggression and insecurity, objectified. They are props, vehicles and substitutes, innocent victims of the primal, conservative fear.

The fear of themselves. Who's number one? They are, the punitive masterminds of their own destruction and the destruction of us all. We are all inadvertent casualties, incidental to the id's imperatives. It's why it doesn't register, when people suffer and die all over the place because of them.

The primal drama must play out. Or maybe we should stop it. We're enabling it, after all. For now we are prisoners, which is a fair result and representation of that right-wing drive, with its cynicism and contempt for life, except for that of the "unborn," those innocents. The rest of us are guilty.

Guilty of having been born, it seems, of having begun our sentence in the prison, plantation or work-farm of life, however you choose to see it, and it's wrong to try to escape or make it less than unpleasant, the point of every plank in a unified and comprehensive conservative platform of misery.

I Have Nothing To Hide

At least, not that I can remember.

How Ya Gonna Keep 'Em Down on the Farm?

After they've seen D.C.? The cotton is high and the living is easy:

The corporate money flows and the graft, it grows, as they dole it out droves, the lobbyists, you know, greasing it all for those that have it, so they can have more. They need it, they need it, they need it, they need it: it's all you ever hear. They will never be the same, and you will never be the same, after you've seen D.C.

Down On Me

At the end of every Republican presidential debate I feel that I want to hear a rousing choral rendition of Down On Me a la Janis Joplin. You would think that these unbelievably privileged people had been hounded, all their lives, by horrible, mobile cactuses or something, chasing them around, the way they talk.

The world is down on them, alright, but not in the way that they portray it.

Absolution

Maybe there's an unintended consequence to feminism, that some guys feel absolved from any ethical requirement to treat women well, since women have declared themselves to be equal and not in need of the condescension of having men look after them. 

It didn't depend on a power disparity, though, and mean that it was open-season on women, since this wasn't the norm anyway, that it was already open-season on anybody, not if you weren't a sociopath to begin with. You sometimes hear the bullshit phrase "it's just business."

This, as though there's a realm in which, in the name of profit and money-making, it's fine to be unethical and a crook and a schmuck and an asshole. Back at you, big-boys. What they want, these people drawn to unprincipled power, is for it to only work in one direction.

They're never the ones being messed with. No. Fucking no. The rules have to apply fairly to everyone. I may propose a union, of women, where they keep track of the men who do this stuff and get back at them, depriving them of sex. And money and other things, the jerks.

From Jesus to Dick Cheney

How do you get from Jesus to Dick Cheney? You don't. You can't. 

Live and Let Live

I met an original, live-and-let-live kind of Lab today. Happiness on four legs. Why can't people be more like that?

Ben Carson

Republican cynicism and self-loathing are coming home. They hate government but they are government. The financial guys play the same game, all short-term. They hope they get out before the big one, the next massive crash they cause. It's musical chairs with our money.

So with the American state. There is no long term. Jesus is coming anyway. Ben Carson is a surgical savant and, typically for a savant, an idiot outside of his area of proficiency, but being an outsider is all that counts and he's the latest un-whatever and anti-everything.

The righties have painted themselves into a corner, requiring a candidate who despises what they themselves are, and they won't get out of there with patience and aplomb. No way. They'll go all reactive and crazy, their proclivity anyway. Let Ben Carson play foosball.

It's his other great skill. The little opposing foosball guys can all be done up as Muslims and other heathen. Let him live out his fantasies in foosball, harmlessly kicking ass at that.

We Had a Dream

If you go with Darwin--reality and justice--you can't pick and choose. The other side, our opponents, make stuff up. That's not our standard, but the truth is this: the people who had a dream have lost. No one openly defends injustice. They reconstrue reality and market injustice as something else.

Often, necessity. We have a dream but they have a story. It is vain and self-serving and untethered to reality: the wonderful white man, the face of a thousand heroes, tamer of beasts, clearer of forests and subduer of enemies. He who keeps order. White men must rule or it all falls into disorder.

Chaos, that is. It's white men or chaos, but if there's been a "pax of the white man" where is it? I'll order me up some, a full portion. The record looks bad, noting the holocaust, a blip on any screen. Way to go, white men! But they still assure us, many wars later, that they are the leaders we need.

Alrighty! In order for the dreamers to recover, though, we have to look fairly at the current outcome, which is that the white-man coalition has wiped a lot of floors with us. From there we go forward. We can't go much further back, I keep thinking, but those white guys are redefining it all the time.

Ugh

I was telling a black guy I know about an experience I increasingly have when I catch someone, in an instance of momentary eye contact, cringing a little and writing me off as--ugh--an oldie. Yes, Jim, my friend said, that's what if feels like to be black, all the time.

Swing Low, Sweet Chariot

Conservatives hate life. It's an interruption, a trial imposed by God, in the true state of perfection and bliss for which we are intended. This is the source of the cynicism. Life is for losers.

They want to escape but have to see it through. They think it's wrong for our earthly existence to be anything other than punitive and difficult. Having conservatives run things only means misery.

Logistics

My father worked in logistics for the Air Force. He was once on a committee of representatives from the various services and headed-up by a guy from the Department of Defense. The idea was to inspect supply depots around the country to determine if it made sense to consolidate the supply of certain things in the hands of the DOD. 

According to my father there was a consensus in the group that it didn't make sense to consolidate any of it. The branches were already into diseconomies of scale independently of one another. But, lo, the report appears, written by the DOD dude, recommending consolidation. My father thinks it was a setup--that the DOD wanted it done.

This reminds me of Ken Starr, for some reason. Anyway, dad refused to sign the report and subsequently got his ass kicked, by so doing. Now, when you look at American businesses and industries and all the consolidation that has occurred, it happened in the same way, not by fair play and the promoting of efficiency, but by influence.

Think of all the formerly locally-owned stores and such which are now nonexistent or part of huge, effectively unregulated and anonymous monster-corps which got that way as part of a gamed and prejudiced system. Yet again, thank you, Republicans, for ruining our country. I remember the locally-owned stores and businesses where I grew up.

They are gone, gone, gone with some kind of ill, right-wing wind--burned, sacked and obliterated, for all intents. It seems inevitable now but it wasn't. It's a choice we made by electing the wrong people, which we did because we, too, were influenced, in subtle and contrived ways. We've been had, but so easily we can't blame anyone but ourselves.

Necessarily Insufficient

Everything is under-determined over time, but entirely determined over more time.

Trump v. Tomatoes

I'm occupied these days with astonishment at the rise of Donald Trump to the ascendency of something, whatever indescribable malfunction and breakdown this represents, and eating tomatoes, my garden producing an explosion of these wonderful things, from bite-size miniatures to terrifying cannonballs capable of causing real harm if carelessly deployed. 

Always I soothe my soul with rock 'n' roll but, generally, it's Trump versus the tomatoes at my house lately, with the Trump thing blowing every meter and measure I have available. Truly Trump is a fifteen on a ten-scale so higher math is required, and I think we've got to go beyond normal methods to get the guy on the page in graphing whatever it is he represents. 

What he represents, I don't know, apart from a huge "screw you" arising from the souls of puritanical Republicans craving utopia and coming unglued over the horrible imperfection of everything. I celebrate and embrace imperfection. It enables me to do as well as I can with my own inadequacy and failings. Perfectionism is horrible and a curse.

In my experience of certain clinical cases, meaning diagnosed OCD, there is usually a dump or landfill around. In every instance I've seen the person has a closet or part of the yard which is a dump, so I think Trump is a dump, a repository of repressed, right-wing psychological garbage and the refuse of denial, probably composting, at his age.

He's the closeted reality of Republicanism, slowly emerging. Meanwhile I'm eating myself into oblivion with tomatoes, all that digestive energy diverting from the Trump conundrum. I've never seen a technically perfect tomato, the embodiment of the form, but I love them and I'm ready to share. You may contact me about this, as long as the harvest lasts. 

Hell Comes to Whoville

Who is Whoville? It must be us. By that I mean some clan of believers, people with certain values, of generosity and caring and fair play and humor, in an undefended and borderless burg visitors to which are won over by the wise ways of the open-hearted Whos.

But Hell has come to Whoville. It was the values that made them special and the values are lost. There wasn't a formal assault--recognizable evil. It came from within and in the form of confusion. Also it occurred over time, rather slowly. They forgot who they were.

Let us mourn the Whos. Let us mourn ourselves.

Talk About Baggage

Even runaway trains have engineers and conductors and administrators and all. This is the script Republicans have chosen for us, a disaster movie, where we are hurtling toward destruction and so reckless indulgence, sanctimony and despair jostle for position in an environment of fear, awaiting the end. So where are we? 

Watching helplessly from the baggage cars, I suppose, not even villains, as their delusion nears its climax in a crash of unknown severity depending on where, exactly, we come off the rails. They will elect a leader, it seems, an engineer, based on the aerodynamics of his hair so he'll look good out front and not impede anything.

 After all, it's only a role.

Blithe Spirits

The scene in Shakespeare in Love keeps popping into my head in which Judi Dench, playing the disguised Queen, stands up abruptly in the theatre and makes a crack about wearing her name out, she deserving more respect. Judi as well, I think, and then there's God. With an election forthcoming--ugh--many names are coming up, including various Founding Fathers. 

Much of it works at the level of assumption and presumption, though sometimes the names are explicitly dropped, and I picture them standing up, Thomas Jefferson or God, let's say, and asserting their right not to be cited in defense of some policy or scheme. Let's keep this in mind as the carnival continues and the debates begin. Maybe I will don a guise. 

Picture me, one in an anonymous crowd of debate watchers, rising suddenly in a tricorn hat or numinously and asserting my right not to be assumed to be backing some Huckabee sponsored hucksterism or Bush boosterism or other nonsense. I won't have it, I will say, as I'm escorted to a special seat or just ascend my ass out of there.

LOL

Donald Trump for President. LOL, LOL, LOL,...

Wankers or Toadies?

I can't decide which word best describes right-wing suck-puppets, so I put it up for a vote: is it wankers or toadies?

Creep Thought

Creep Thought is a deranged supercomputer, evidently in the hands of right-wing extremists, capable of a higher degree of twisted calculation than an unhinged Einstein on amphetamines. Additionally it has a "chew on this" function which enables it to use free resources on questions of no immediate practical application, such as the meaning of death, despair and nothingness.

The computer also cheats at chess and counts cards. Republican meta-psychologists had found that it was hard to thwart the normal empathetic functioning of aggregations of human beings over time. Individual sociopaths are all over the place but to get people to practice the inverse of the Golden Rule consistently was not easy and required highly-evolved algorithms of perversion. 

Within Republican ranks there is tension between those who want only to make money and those who want to hasten the end of the world, but there is a common desire for cash because rushing the apocalypse turns out to be expensive. The world doesn't want to end yet and the money crowd doesn't want to die but religious fundamentalists are in control and increasingly insistent about their aims.

The computer, originally code-named "non-sequitur" but now affectionately known as Sarah, for Sarah Palin, has recommended selfishness as the quickest path to world self-annihilation. This primal human trait is the fastest way to destruction. And the answer to the ultimate question, of death, despair and nothingness? Sarah Palin. Self reflection, that is. Look only to yourself and you will find nothing.

The Quest for Cuervo

I need a drink. And, I mean, I need to be permanently, partially drunk to deal with the stuff going on around me. Anyone who thought that humanity is heading, inexorably, for a more-evolved place, I say to you: Donald Trump. Hand me the Jose.

Partial Reality

You know, I think there's reality and then, well, unreality. It's hard to imagine them mixing it up and getting along, like matter and anti-matter, but then there's humanity, stuck in a strange, contradictory existence. People are capable of self-awareness, abstraction and reflection but still mortal and witnesses to their own personal and corporate decay. 

By corporate I mean our inability not to cause the destruction of our own species, but three cheers for us anyway. The planet and universe may do well to see the end of humanity. Let's suppose it's our inevitable end and nothing to be fought against or resisted or derided, but there's an aspect to us I find intriguing, that we appear to live in permanent partial-reality.

We can't exist without some grip on things but can't get the other foot out of the swamp of insanity and compulsion. Then the alligator comes and pulls us entirely under or maybe we just give up and sink-in out of fatigue and despair. Whatever. But what do we find so compelling about the swamp of unreality? Oh, reality is our mortality and we don't like that.

Tough shit, as we used to say when I was a kid. There's a lot to be said for reason and truth and the justice of accepting our fate and living in a truly civilized way, firstly with a sense of responsibility to one another and a willingness to share the resources needed for our individual and corporate survival. Maybe there's a species version of reincarnation and we'll get another shot. 

We seem to have blown it, this time.

Rebels Without a Cause

What an amazing thing it is to consider that the reactionary right might be caught in the flames they have fanned for so long, those of bigotry and resentment and exclusion and aggression, and that the agent for this may be his hairness, Donald Trump.

For decades now reasonable Americans have watched unbelievingly as the crazy bar moves higher and higher. The only filter Republicans seem to reliably apply is "not crazy enough." They'll jettison anything in favor of the bright, shiny new object of insane desire.

Truly, the coefficient of crazy is higher than ever and Republicans must have a secret, probably unconscious, compulsion to destroy the American state, like adolescents challenging authority from a need to be assured of the authority's strength.

I say: grow up. Republicans are difficult children--truants, renegades and delinquents--and must not be indulged or allowed power over anything. They will only wreck it, wanting reassurance of its resiliency. It's not for the rest of us to be responsible for this.

We can't be. It's simply not our place.

Trashed

I was riding in the car once with a friend and the SUV in front of us barfed out some fast-food trash just before turning into a subdivision, a Habitat for Humanity subdivision, an unusual thing. Someone gave them a tract of land. Normally they build individual houses here and there. The two people in the SUV were Hispanic. 

My friend thought that the trash-barfing was cultural, that they didn't see litter as trash or as discordant in the environment, only as "stuff out there," but I will bet you their houses were tidy. No matter, but this is what happens when people are excluded and uninvested in their society and when there is no expectation of justice.

The disunity affects everyone and disunity is what Republicans now promote: average citizens are "stuff out there" to them, trash and road-kill. Average people mean nothing to wealthy Republicans. Maybe it's wrong to say they don't care because it assumes a context where caring makes sense. We are simply nothing to them.

When they talk about freedom they mean their freedom: the freedom to do whatever they want whenever they want, to live on inherited money or have it easy and have all the security imaginable, no matter what, at our expense. It was hard to comprehend the trash thing, that someone could not see it as trash.

But average citizens are now nothing, detritus, being outside of the virtual community of wealth, and undeserving of health care or a job or a fair shake, due to the partisanship, selfishness and polarization. "Black Lives Matter" isn't jingoism. Black lives don't matter. America wants black people to go away.

Now that they've had their use of them. Average white people, get a clue. This now applies to you. The Chinese are slaving away so you aren't needed anymore. If the right-wing crazies destroy the economy again--permanently, this time--you will be left holding the bag in a way you never thought possible. Wait and see.

Too Bad

I've really limited my news input and it has helped enormously with my equilibrium. The election coverage, though, is hard to avoid and then I see that George W. Bush has been paid a big chunk of cash to give a talk to a wounded veterans group. 

At some point you have to cry "uncle" and say that it is all over and just give up. Clearly this is it. If that unrepentant piece of shit can do this without being struck down by the gods of justice or, at least, severely smacked by a wounded vet, all is lost.

We are Yugoslavia

I visited Washington years ago and stayed with a friend-of-a-friend who lived in a tiny apartment above Daniel Patrick Moynihan's house, or part of it. Cool, huh? We went to a performance of Yugoslavian dancers at the Kennedy Center -- Matt was Yugoslavian. 

The dancing was amazing and very diverse, which I commented on and Matt said, well, there's a reason for that: that the country was totally fragmented and religiously polarized and that it would fall apart the minute it wasn't held together by force.

Of course it did, brutally and genocidally. This is us, to a much greater extent than we care to think. We have never been one country but two, North and South. We are now becoming one but on what terms? On those of the South, I would say -- property and privilege.

An aside:

There was another very distant brush with Moynihan, in my life. I had neighbors as a kid, the Finns, and in an act of tolerance now beyond imagining to me they let us neighborhood youths use their small, full-court basketball set-up. We abused it, of course. 

We abused both the court and the kindness. I also house-sat for the Finns. Their older son, Chester, had been Moynihan's aide in India and had married an Indian woman. I think I met them all, Chester and family, and there was a picture or two of Moynihan around. 

Mr. Finn, the father, spoke of Moynihan's charm and how likable and engaging he was. Anyway, the Finns and some other Jewish neighbors were my introduction to a world of higher standards and accomplishment. My parents were smart and well-educated and open-minded and kind.

But there was something those Jewish families introduced me to which I appreciated later, a bigger view of everything. It also rained brisket when somebody died. The last time I ran into a reference to him Chester was still around, at a university, and a Republican.

Darn it. I will always think highly of any Finn, though, because of those parents.

Another Narcissistic Enterprise

My internet travels take me to all kinds of places. This morning's examples: Precision Strategies and The Omidyar Network. These are my peeps, in some ways. We're on the same side, I think, but the self-satisfaction is just so intense. Okay, you're the good guys, but how about we get some shit done?

They do get stuff done but there's a societal aspect to this which takes the whole thing to the same place as the war on drugs: we're funding both sides. I don't want to be a trash-man for the American rightists, cleaning up the messes of the Reaganites and Bush supporters. Let's stop the damage first.

Then we can spend our money actually going forwards, not just trying to undo the bad works of crazy Republicans.

One Oath is Enough

Something's wrong when nearly all of the elected representatives of the Republican party take a second oath in Washington. And that party is always in power because they insist on having their way even when they lose and that second oath is way more enforceable than the other, the oath of office.

This is about Grover Norquist, the anti-tax man. Grover should have been run out of Washington in shame after the Abramoff scandal, a telling glimpse of what these guys actually stand for. We didn't need another glimpse but there it is, the white boys stealing and engaging in insulting, racist small talk.

It is fundamental. Grover's organization is anti-democratic to a revolutionary extent. If we can't stop such an open and blatant challenge to the essential, fair functioning of our government we are done-for and deserve to be. I won't begrudge Grover his private-jet forays to Burning Man.

He can keep all that but he must go.

Cut It Out

Let's be clear, when you hear the word "cut" coming from the Republican side, substitute the word "kill." Cutting is killing. When they move money from people who need it to people who don't people die. When they squander money like bandits in places like Iraq people die. 

While they insist that the war on drugs continue people die. People die while they piss away America's prosperity living like pigs. People die while they shop and play golf and manage their investments and live smug lives. Republicans kill people. This is their idea of normal.

In My Opinion...

Racism is anything other than judging people by standards of behavior.

Original sin is taking things for granted, especially the gift of your life.

Logo-land

I had one of those dreams in which all the ugliness of the world was gone, both the physical ugliness and interpersonal strife. It wasn't wimpy, just not ugly. All the buildings were painted-brick with big windows and they were fresh but not quite gleaming.

It was a multifarious world, full of surprises and small businesses, everything unique but clearly part of a system, with shops and manufacturing and farms and interesting venues of every sort, entirely organic and obviously the product of an evolutionary process.

Even the instances of weirdness and dysfunction and mildly dangerous or threatening places made sense. It all fit and had a role, of a sort. I guess it was a complete melding of a child's view, with the validity of things assumed as presented, and an adult view. 

I was an adult in the dream, kind of, and looking at everything non-judgmentally but not without suspicion, trustingly but not naively. The most remarkable aspect was how everything simply belonged and had a place, as in a biological system. 

People were living as a species in a way that made sense in the world, though at the top in terms of power, and interpersonally like an ecosystem as well, hierarchically, but smoothly and without striving or obsession, and there was only walking and trains.

What was strikingly missing were corporate, consolidated entities. There were bigger things but always still at a human scale. You never turned a corner and saw a mall or a Walmart. The political or social system was transparent, allowing people to do what they do. 

To work and to live. The dream left me with an intense yearning, I'm not sure for what, but I think for immersion and belonging, to be part of a world within which everyone is free and independent and secure, and where there is proportion, logos.

They say somewhere that it was there in the beginning.

Howling Mad

All you can hope for, watching the parade of lunatics now running for president from the Republican side, is that there is an undiscovered mechanism wherein, at the highest level of insanity and perversity, an organism becomes too at-odds with itself to function and raptures or is transmogrified or morphs into another state of being in order to preserve itself, an elemental trick of survival. 

Take Ted Cruz. In order to be as consistently wrong as Cruz is there has to be an understanding, somewhere within him, of what is right but it must be unconscious or repressed. He must be possessed. Aha, there must be a demon in him, or gremlin, which explains the strange, destructive output of the Cruz-entity and the inconsistency of his opinions with everything he purports to be.

He says he is a Christian and a loyal citizen and patriot, a lover of America, and a crusader for what is right and true and, yet, there is no evidence of a conscience at a child's level, that of connecting the dots, simple cause and effect. Cruz/demon must be required to defend itself: the wars and killing, ethno-chauvinism, intolerance in every form, heartlessness in the face of human need, etc.

Perhaps this will act as an exorcism and the demon will flee, leaving an identifiable human form, maybe alive and with a normal, functioning conscience, capable of living with other people in the absence of predator drones, persecution and extreme judging. It is an interesting, indeterminate situation. Demons are notoriously cunning and tough so the Cruz carcass, the bodily vessel, may not survive.

But the soul we assume to be there somewhere, however beaten-down and demoralized, will either be able to function within the body known as "Cruz" or be free, a better outcome anyway for both Cruz, the man assumed to exist, independently of the demon, and society. Keep a crucifix with you in case you encounter him. And maybe some garlic. Be prepared. He's a piece of work.