The Prodigal Exemption

I know I'm hard on conservatives. I can't help it if they're out of their minds. But I would welcome them back, anytime, to the land of sanity and the flock and fold of true believers in the authentic values and traditions of America. They must repent, however, and change their ways.

Grinch-Jacking

In another inversion-of-reality special Ted Cruz has hijacked Dr. Seuss. May those little girls he has inappropriately used to further his megalomania and rampaging ambition grow up to know that their father is a hideous hypocrite and a scoundrel.

He's a self-serving schmuck and a loathsome liar and charlatan. Is there no one who can sue him for this? Hello? The heirs of Dr. Seuss should be pissed. The heirs of the true American traditions of reason and fair play and generosity should be up in arms.

Or take up arms. God, give us another John Brown. The right-wingers assault people the way weaklings always do, by remote control and manipulation, and without retribution. They should be compelled to suffer the consequences of their chicanery.

Intestinal Fortitude

Someday there has to be an honest reckoning on the gut of George W. Bush and where it got us. His no-mandate presidency was the model of anti-government ineptitude, with the occasional, accidental or incidental non-failure.

The Bushers were unconscious in their way, animated more by the need for aggression, certainty and self-righteousness than anything. Does anyone ever intentionally embrace evil? I don't think so. Those who seem to do so are sick.

It's hard to credit most evil-doers with real agency, which gets us to the great man's famous gut. The gut guided him, by his own authority and claim, and must have kept him from the awareness of the consequences of his actions.

Bush's reliance on his intestines was the passing along of agency to the realm of instinctual, unconscious forces, an abdication of free will and responsibility. Yes, the dumbass told us what he was doing and we were too stupid to see it.

Let's Play "Pretend"

Pretend Americans don't torture people. Pretend we are independent and free. Pretend we have any intention of leaving the country unimpaired to our kids. Let's just pretend we give a shit about anything, to remember what it feels like.

Marco-Terrorism

Conservatives do not give up. If they hate something it is toast. They hate "Obamacare" so it must go, by fair means or any means, hence the Marco-man's time-bomb.

He stuck it into a bill, so the American government is hanging health insurers out, failing to pay promised funds to protect them in the early years of the ACA. And, my God.

We're talking about the amount of money the top two, or maybe three, hedge fund guys make in a year, or a stealth bomber and a half, wasted on health services for citizens.

Marco, expert in government by hostage-taking and molotov cocktail, will say, yet again: "See, government sucks." Get up off your knees, Marco. No, he's not praying.

At least not to a recognized God. He's bowing down before wealthy donors. What he does, exactly, on his knees I don't know, but Republicans are submissive sorts. 

They believe so strongly in hierarchy that they aspire to be henchmen. It's an affront to the American and Christian traditions of individualism, but dare not to disagree!

To be anti-them is anathema. The real affront, in their minds, is not to challenge principles but to challenge people, their overlords, the wealthy of the earth, God's chosen.

Maybe I've Been Wrong About Everything

I buy a lot of stuff on eBay, mostly for my work. I have to say, eBay is amazing. The sellers on there, in my experience, are mostly really trying. It challenges my assumption that Americans are idiots.

Some of these people must be politically conservative. This means their foreign policy is "fuck off." Their domestic policy, "fuck you." Their economic doctrine, "fuck-it." But these people are nice.

I can't make sense of it. There's a disconnect somewhere and I'm not seeing it, but maybe it's because the eBay transactions are personal. The rest of it is impersonal or so it seems to them.

But it's not impersonal at all. Foreign policy is personal. Domestic policy is personal. The economy is personal. Everything is personal. I don't know how to convey this to conservatives.

Dwarf Army

In the famous "seven dwarves" testimony from 1994 the heads of all the major tobacco companies testified before Congress, under oath, that they did not think that nicotine is addicting.

The dwarf army has invaded Washington. There's no climate change, cutting taxes on the rich is the answer to every economic and social ill and money spent on the military doesn't count.

What kind of short-circuit occurs in their minds? Is it induced by greed? Ambition? Religious fervor? Nervous collapse or mental disintegration? Whatever the case, it's no way to run a country.

The Voices Crying in the Wall Street Wilderness

"Make straight their paths. They are the lords of finance." The Anti-Christs have come, with their soul-sucking greed. Hallelujah, we are un-saved!

U. S. B.

Everything points to me to renaming the country. Maybe it will mean a fresh start. John Brown would be an excellent person to honor since he saw how screwed up we are on race.

The "United States of Brown" is to be the new name. I'm sure we'll have no trouble getting this through Congress. Or, if that doesn't work, how about "Boca Raton"? 

I've always liked the way it sounds and I think it means something like "mouse mouth" so it's pretty non-partisan and shouldn't offend anyone.

Live by the Blowhard, Die by the Blowhard

Well, George Will, see what you get?

We're Bedraggled

We're living the Faust story, the part where it gets interesting. The devil is demanding his due. The pact, the deal with the devil, was called the Southern Strategy. Republicans pandered and played the race card and they won.

But now the forces of chaos are rising up and can't be stopped. The social conservatives, the dupes and fools, are insisting they get the insane stuff they've always wanted. See you on the other side, whatever is left of us.

My Cell Tower Thinks I'm Overseas

I knew it. This is not the United States of America. It can't be. Look at the flaming idiots in charge, in a country founded on enlightened ideals. They have no ideals, no enlightenment. 

They're pigs and squatters. Amnesiacs. But my cell tower tells me I'm in another country, surely some hell-hole, so that explains it. Thank God. I knew this couldn't be us.

A Guy From Chennai

They interviewed a guy, a "citizen of Chennai," on the BBC the other day about the flood there. He was so articulate and sane it made me weep, virtually, for our insanity. I remember him saying "this is not the time to point fingers."

Citizen, will you join us? We no longer know how to live. We are a disgrace, a nut nation smashed on consumption and self-righteousness. I can't remember the last time I heard an American speak so well. "Citizen." It has a strange ring. 

We don't believe in citizenship anymore. It's individualism running amok among us, or demagoguery on the other end, with no middle left. It's every man for himself now. That, or fascism. We have become a nation of crazy people and we can't see it. 

Coffee, Tea, or Thee

Evangelical Christians play it cool. It's never, ever, about them. Always the scrutiny is turned outward.

Let's turn it in, on them.

The Cracked Nut

Word has it that Republicans are doing a remake of THE NUTCRACKER that involves a lot of head-bashing, part of a broader effort to counteract left-wing influence among the young, which is turning us into a nation of pussies.

How in the hell are we to deal with Sharia Law and suicide-bombers and all that shit if we teach our kids to be nice, let alone sentimental, when they may have to blow themselves up someday in order to counteract the Islamic threat?

This would only be as a last resort, of course, but you have to fight fire with fire, or maybe gasoline, as Republicans have done successfully in causing Muslims to show their true colors. They knew that those heathen were after us.

It was apparent in all the oil deals, when they put us through unnecessary trouble and expense in securing what is rightfully ours, since everyone knows that we are God's chosen people and better than everyone else. The nerve!

As for THE CRACKED NUT, the right-wing's answer to the usual flaccid holiday fare, you are encouraged to take your kids to see it more than once, to make sure that they become instinctively suspicious, aggressive and mean.

Keep Your Heads Down

At Fox-Hole, the conservative news network, they cower in safety as others are killed. Anything could happen, though. John Boehner went under the bus in an instant. You see it again and again in gangster movies, when the trusted henchman becomes the object of fear.

It could happen to any of them. They are schismatics and secessionists and won't stop until they are alone, isolated, in a room full of guns or the virtual version, or down to the status of a snake-handler in a church in a holler somewhere with a small band of true believers.

Helmet! Flak-Jacket!

INCOMING! Here we are again, folks. I'm reporting to you from a foxhole at--GET DOWN, DUMBASS! Sorry, where was I? Oh, yes. I'm reporting to you from a foxhole at the front lines in the culture war and it is not looking good. The carnage is indescribable. 

Truth blown to bits. Fair Play a distant memory. Justice and the American Way are missing and assumed dead. This war has redefined collateral damage because of the deceit and the treachery. So much for the distinction between combatants and non-combatants!

It doesn't exist, so steel your stomachs for the photos, folks. The inhumanity is unprecedented in our history. Our adversaries are killing machines. They have no conscience and no mercy. It is as though they are possessed. Their certainty is unshakeable. 

Their determination is supreme. Prepare yourselves. Say goodbye to your loved ones. Don't bother with a will. It's too late for that. The enemy is among us so I doubt I will survive. RUN, BOY, RUN! Remember, that once there was a spot--our Camelot!

White-Boy Basketball

What the Koch boys and their allies really want is arrested development. They want everything arrested where they have the advantage. Think white-boy basketball in the 1950's, all insularity and privilege.

And look at pro-ball today, the home of the purest competition anywhere. It's regulated all to hell and the draft is socialism by any standard but not a giveaway. The giveaway goes in the other direction.

In the absence, that is, of extremely strict regulation, which ensures that the system which funds the thing is itself funded. Otherwise the sport implodes. This is the libertarian plan for America--implosion. 

They will all walk away--from the economy, their espoused principles and the country. They'll probably live on an island they bought somewhere with their own militia. They don't care about the country.

Why should we care about them?

Shit-Homers

People like Paul Ryan must shit-home.  At some point in their creepy lives the contempt takes over and they start selectively zeroing in on the bad stuff, the rationalizations and predications and justifications for a long and unproductive life of privilege. 

Contempt is the key to this and isolation the result, a bunker mentality, culminating in a fragmented psyche in a fragmented, polarized, inauthentic society. Theirs is a subculture of like-minded people compelled by contempt to feel superior, that they are somehow better.

They think that they are uncovering this, the weird hierarchy, but they are creating it. The shit-homers will their dystopian society into existence. They home-in on the likes of loathsome Ayn Rand and long to be among her übermensch. Other people are untermensch.

This is the same old issue, the forces of order and civilization against the forces of disorder and disintegration. Disintegration because, why, in the end, should people acquiesce in a system that spurns them? A system that punishes, abuses and exploits them?

They will not. Paul Ryan's primal society can only survive where there is an enormous power disparity, rooted in privilege, the thing explicitly disallowed in "all men are created equal...." Without it we go right back to the murderous sectarianism of tribal societies.

Afghanistan, anyone?

ZuZu's Petals

I asked a friend of mine how in the world Republicans could watch It's a Wonderful Life at Christmas-time and not cackle like crazy and wring their hands with sinister glee over Mr Potter and at the sight of the wonderfulness of the cruel, Calvinist dream-world of Pottersville, thinking they must be in denial about it, and damn if he didn't think they do cackle and wring and maybe chortle.

He said a friend of his does, anyway, an extremely rich guy who inherited it all. The anger surged up in me and I wanted to go and get the rich guy and shove ZuZu's petals where the sun never shines and a lot of old barbed wire too and then disembowel him and force his intestines and the barbed wire and the petals all down his throat and kill him as gruesomely and with as much pain as possible. 

Hmmm.... That's not a very Christmassy attitude on my part, actually, is it? 

Identity Issues

Wow. The United States of America, the most powerful country ever, is now being run by the ethical equivalent of skinheads. Maybe there's something cool about this, in a punk-rock kind of way, but I find it upsetting.

The only rational, and therefore non-racist, way of judging people is by how they behave. Those who don't are usually judging people by affiliation or identification with a tribe or clan, or some other incidental thing.

Our Man Woodrow

What good does it do to rename a building or some institution? And where do you stop? Amerigo Vespucci may have been a lout and who knows what else.

I apply this test: is it about owning or disowning something? And what? In disowning Woodrow Wilson we would be disowning ourselves.

Our heritage of racism. He isn't in any way an outlier, abnormal or unrepresentative. It may make us feel better but he isn't a rallying point for anything.

Not about race or anything unambiguously bad, anyway. Now the Stone Mountain Memorial, on the other hand, I would call in the drones on that.

Anti-Culture

It only takes a couple of minutes of looking at the history of human migrations to realize that nobody is indigenous anywhere. We're all resident aliens, invasive exotics. It's a tale of occupation and ass-kicking. Early on it was possible to move somewhere where there wasn't already human habitation, somewhere without political jurisdiction, however shaky. 

Good luck with that now. The planet is pretty well settled. Beyond this it's all about culture, to my mind, escaping a situation where power is all that matters. After 9/11 the U.S. abandoned its ideals and declared open season, supposedly on "the terrorists," but also on its own people, by accepting the terrorists' terms and creating the apparatus of a police state. 

We basically said "bring it on" to our convenient enemies. In fact I think some idiot did say that. And every citizen is now a suspect. So the country's culture warriors are actually anti-culture warriors. They aren't representing civilized, let's say, Christian, values but throwing those values out the window. This is the problem with immigration, for example. 

Those people have hope in us. So sorry. They are more American than we are but it's too late. We are misrepresenting our values to the world and to everyone. America will inevitably become brown. Let's hope the brown people have the sense and strength to return us to our ideals, though we have represented them so imperfectly.

I hate to think that those values are gone from us forever.

The Wife of the Don

It's interesting that Donald always has a wife where there's a huge power disparity. And they look as though he bought them at a department store. 

You would think that there would be a little authenticity in this one part of his life, but, no. He's a sham and a pharaoh, after several generations of breeding. 

He's an entity without essence, only function. I guess it means he's a machine, someone without a soul. I bet he's out there in search of a soul, a thing you can't buy.

Ah, maybe his wives act as his soul, soul/mates. They say his kids aren't so bad. Or maybe he thinks the presidency will provide him with one, a soul. 

That's not my idea of a dignified end for a country, as the trophy-wife of a mogul, and not the first, but, hey, it's a new and different world out there.

Can We Be Saved?

No, I don't think so.

R. I. P.

Reporting from the front lines in the culture wars, I have some sad news: Uncle Sam is dead. That kind and peace-loving gentleman was strangled by the burly hands of a white Southern oaf who took offense at the idea that we are all one nation, a common people with a shared destiny and values. 

The old fellow, who cut his teeth on those principles in two World Wars, was surprised by the assault and unable to defend himself, thinking his beliefs were held by all Americans, including the moron who strangled him while mumbling something incoherent about "socialism."

Truthiness is Stranger Than Fiction

Truthiness is fiction with a pretense of reality, which means it is more fictive than fiction, which hasn't the pretense. 

Flananomics

My economic theory has elements gleaned from reliable sources, and sometimes made up, and then loosely and incoherently stitched together into something I wouldn't call a system, but it falls broadly under the heading of "baroque" in the history of economic thought.

The incoherence is out of respect for and in deference to the inscrutability of economic matters. The idea is to operate on the basis of what you know and not worry about the rest. I deal only with capitalism and the new world order of incomprehensible wealth.

It really is incomprehensible and, according to one of my core tenets, serious wealth is by its nature predatory and parasitic, not to sound critical, because these are naturally occurring roles and functions. It is normal for predators and parasites to take out weak individuals.

But not entire species, such as the middle class, destabilizing everything and resulting in systemic collapse, in which case everyone is harmed, even the wealthy. This kind of extreme wealth, called "serious" with intentional ambiguity, is impossible without prey.

The wealthy class must be protected from itself by very high marginal tax rates which, it turns out, are objectively "fair" because individuals are incapable of creating this wealth. In the physics of economics it is impossible. Wealth is created by societies, not individuals.

Wealth is a systemic and social function. Natural resources, in particular, are reasonably claimed by everyone, all individuals. Subject to sustainability, that is, in a society that is not suicidal or dominated by religious fanatics and other lunatics with a yen for destruction.

Those people are not irrational, only insane, and should be quarantined. Economies should function as ecosystems. Prejudicially, prey is regarded as a lower element in the system, though all elements have a necessary and natural place. Wealth is the product of socialism.

It is redistributive in the opposite of the way in which the term is usually used, in the moving of rewards upward in the system as a subsidy and the granting of privilege with respect to natural resources, as though everyone does not have an equal claim on these.

 

Depriving someone of a fair share of the productive output of a society is disenfranchisement, reducing citizens to serfs, slaves and the spoils of economic warfare. In American this is a violation of our inalienable rights, granted by God and society.

Brownbacking It

In the interests of ease and efficiency I pose a new question: what isn't the matter with Kansas? It's the new Republican utopian nightmare, our closest approximation to Afghanistan. Let's call it the "Screw Me State." What kind of morons voted for this mess? 

Good, old-fashioned, American, knuckle-dragging Neanderthals. Picture them sitting on their porches, cradling an M-16. Ewen McGregor's great rant from TRAINSPOTTING comes to mind: Kansans aren't even wankers, they're colonized by wankers, wrecking crew wankers.

In other words, they're such losers they don't even qualify as jerks, just dopes. Many other states, mostly Southern, are poised for this fate. We should put a fence around Kansas before it's too late, with an additional fence around Lawrence, as an asylum for the sane.

Trumpelstiltskin

Promises, promises. I'm through with promises, or promissory notes, or whatever. Donald the imp, the predatory sprite, specializes in the family tradition of finding and taking advantage of weakness. Always there is a price, and the only precondition for the practice is that you have no conscience at all.

It makes life so much easier, not having a conscience. And profitable. There are promises, always, on both ends but the end result of the deals, on average, is that Donald will come out ahead and carry on seeking out vulnerability and helplessness. Down on your luck? Don't turn to pitiless Donald.

And weep for your children. Among his ilk, innocence only inspires contempt and the hunger for more money and power for themselves.

FOP

Donald Trump may be our first-ever, full-fledged FOP, fuck-off president. He's failed, so far, to work his way fully back in the fuck-off hierarchy, having spared his own constituents, the fuck-off base. He will, though, if elected, give the finger to everyone, for sure, even those who elect him.

They're fired! He will be our first FOP, the First FOP, in addition to being a fop. Who will be his FLOTUS, our first FOPess, the First FOPess? All I can see is one hell of a hair-do. Will she upstage the Donald, on the hair front, a ship's figurehead to Trump's hood ornament? He won't have it!

Hardassed

Sometimes I have to go hardass with myself and be insistent and ask: what do I want? Or, what do I really know? What is the best information I have, the thing most likely to be true?

This is an old habit but also a crossword thing, when you get down to answers you don't know and have to collate and integrate likeliest answers across clues. It's good practice for life.

Decision-making is an important skill and you have to play percentages. If I ever stop making mistakes I'll know I have stopped living, by my standards, growing and learning and adapting.

Usually the Problem...

Is that people see things as binary when they're not: good or bad, right or wrong, black or white, us or them. But elections are binary and Democrats don't get it. It doesn't matter if you're right if you continually lose.

Democrats are losing even when they win, since Republicans won't let them govern. The most Democrats can hope for is to undo some of the damage done by Republicans. We can't go on like this. It's too messed up. 

The end is near.

My Side: The Losers

The Left hasn't had a meaningful hand in running our country for decades now. America was always essentially progressive: open-minded, adaptive, practical and not fundamentally ideological. We knew who we were, as defined against monarchists, fascists, royalists, racists, commies and such.

What the hell happened? We are becoming all of these at once. It's unclear which strain of insanity will win, but behold Donald Trump, way too something, a morphing maniac, spouting inconsistent positions which, not to his credit, occasionally include some sense, an intelligible policy or position.

There is no way the Left can not be implicated in this. Remember when we won the Gay thing? We were simply right, that it can't be morally wrong if it isn't a choice. You could condemn someone for having gay sex but not for being gay. The Right cried "uncle." Triumphalism ensued, on our side.

I can picture the victors in D.C., dancing around chanting "LGBT, LGBT." Tell me, how are the "T" and the "B" the equivalent of the "L" and the "G"? The "B" and "T" look a lot more like choices to me, not states of being. I actually don't know, but I do know this: people don't like to eat shit.

Democrats should understand, having had that feed-bag on forever, but we gave in to a lot of unseemly, self-righteous celebrating. It's bad morality and bad politics. We should have immediately talked about everyone having a place, a voice, a fair-shake, and a shot at a decent life.

But, no, we had to put it in their faces and reaffirm their worst fear, that they were cracking the door to a lot of other stuff if they lost anything. We could as easily have welcomed them into a coalition of people who reason and care. Instead we appear to be a party of outsiders and misfits.

I know better, but look at how we present. We make it much too hard, unnecessarily, for people who see things differently to want to join us. Righties should be running from Trump like a disease. We have made it too hard for them to jump that ship, with only our own righteousness to show for it.

Failed Utopias

Is there any other kind?

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.