Shitcatchers

Did you see the movie Songcatcher, with Janet McTeer and Aidan Quinn? It's true, that they found the most primitive, original and unspoiled versions of Scots-Irish songs anywhere in the isolated American mountains.

It applies to other things. We think that we're better than Europe--and better than everybody. We think that we avoided all the baggage of the conflicts culminating there in the horror of mechanized warfare and genocide. 

We didn't. We're just behind. The baggage, a nightmare of unreason and religious fanaticism and Calvinist extremism, has overtaken us. We're late bloomers. Witness the racists crawling out of their hiding places.

If anyone cares they can find the most primitive versions of Puritanism and doctrinal absolutism and sectarian resentment right here, transplanted and growing vigorously in the hills and hollers and everywhere else.

Trapped

Oh, Lord. Enjoying an escape from reality only works when you live in reality. But when you live in a dream world--a nightmare, really--it's no fun having the same stuff thrown at you in your leisure.

That's how I felt watching a new installment this evening of Sherlock. Reality: Moriarty walks up and shoots Sherlock dead. Really, dead. How about that for a story line? It's a little low on suspense. 

Reality: Republicans destroy the economy, create inconceivable deficits and debt and make the middle class go away. But the story line, the plot, is all the opposite: they are sane and fiscally responsible.

They are patriots. They create jobs. They love "America." What the hell is "America"? There's not a viable Republican representing real American ideals, traditions and Constitutional practices. 

And yet they go on and on about the Constitution, as though they own the franchise, the fuckers. Their heroes live like Sherlock, with the inevitability of a good outcome, by dint of innate excellence.

We've seen their excellence. Excellence at incompetence. Excellence at lying, cheating and stealing. Excellence at a complete lack of virtue. Write it up, Dr. Watson, into a good story. Reality sucks.

House, but On Fire

I've been watching the hospital drama House on Netflix. Here we have another, cranky, heroic white man saving lives left and right. Someone will build a statue some day, blah, blah, blah. 

Typically, though, the way of the white boys is that of George W. Bush, Donald Rumsfeld and Dick Cheney, honkey screw-ups with a sure sense of their own competence and self-worth.

They deserve incarceration and censure but it would at least be good to see a national, global or cosmic consensus on their collective, unparalleled failure. Man, did they kill a lot of people.

Bold white boys need to be more circumspect. There's no need for more heroic, fictional characters reassuring them of their superiority. It results in a kind of bottomless moral blindness.

The House of Bush still thinks it will be proved right. History already proves them wrong but "instant forgetting" is their friend. That, and the conservative rewrite of history, protect them. 

Life Among the Nihilists

I had trouble understanding the Paris attacks when they happened. Mass shootings are more than anyone can comprehend. I try to get inside of things sympathetically but I can't do it with the crazy-fucks who do this stuff, only with the people they attack.

Now, with some distance, what I remember is about a French philosopher, Andre Glucksmann, who called this kind of terrorism "nihilist." It seems true to me because it is destruction for the sake of destruction, an unintelligible thing, madness.

It made me think of Thomas Frank and his book, "The Wrecking Crew," about our right-wing. Frank, in an introduction, seemed to believe that the election of Barack Obama was a rejection of the wreckers. He was assuming, I think, intelligibility.

He thought that the wrecker coalition was cunning, not crazy. But they look to me now like nihilists. They have abandoned all standards, an expression of contempt for everything. They embrace an ethic of death. There is no goal, end-game or resolution.

It's acting-out. Also I think it is an attempt to flush God out of the shadows. It's an adult version of the testing done by adolescents to try to reassure themselves that their parents are resilient and worth respecting. They are trying to force God's hand.

They want to see God so they assume the role of the anti-Christ. They are people of fear. We are in very, very big trouble. They have chosen a battle that ends with someone in the ditch and we are in the middle of it, more or less like civilians in a war-zone.

Unconsciously they want to be stopped, so they bait God. And we have only to unelect them. Poof! Crazy gone. Poof! Peace and normalcy. It's hard, though, because they are so insane. Look at the harm they cause. Look at how they lie and cheat and steal.

Look at how they have co-opted the entire government and sabotage everything. And they want God, the existential parent, to stop them. It's an affront to God if anyone else tries, so they are mighty reactive. They are our nihilists.

Only the Young Die Good

Do you ever have the feeling we've worn out our planetary welcome? Some people would say we own the place and can trash it at will, the hooligans. Where do we go from there? 

To jail, you hope, for the hooligans. There's a chance, then, of going somewhere good, as guests. Not somewhere else but we could be good guests, instead of a bunch of rock stars.

Don't get me wrong. I loved Keith Moon and I wish he were still alive, but I wouldn't have wanted him as a roomie. I think I just equated evangelical Christians with Keith Moon. 

They're vandals. Evangelical Christians think it's their right to wreck the world. They think God wants it, maybe. I say lock them up. Possibly, too, they are working for the other guy.

The guy with the little horns.

The Inviolable Precepts of Republicanism

Cut taxes, squander money on defense, deregulate everything and install political hacks in important jobs. 

Making America Suck Some More

The Republican rhetoric is heading right back to Reagan-land. "It's Morning in America." Right. The dawning of the age of bullshit. 

"Make America Great Again." Right. Even Republicans long for the days when they weren't running things. So, we trust them now? 

Right. We're supposed to trust the people who made us suck in the first place. Really? But we are dealing with an ignorant electorate. 

Uh-oh. They reelected George W. Bush. Shit, anything could happen.

"No Rain"

We have been having an ass-load of rain lately, courtesy of El Niño. I wonder if the hippie tactic might finally work: standing out in it and chanting "no rain" like they did at Woodstock. Something about that seemed really Irish to me, a stylish exercise in futility. 

There's something about the Irish, a tradition not only of accepting their failure but celebrating it, and laughing about it and having a drink. They do this even with death. It reminds me of the "occupy" movements, which I admired, as long as it was good-natured.

The power disparity, between the protestors and the Wall Street crowd, was insane, downright undemocratic. They may as well have been chanting in the rain. That's where we all are now, helpless passengers along for the ride, up against the politics of big money.

Cool Foundations

I've heard about the philanthropic foundations, most recently the Ford Foundation, and I'm impressed by how intelligent and well-intentioned the people are who run them.

But what sense does any of it make when they are working at cross-purposes with our own government? They are trying to alleviate problems our government is causing. 

It makes me think that they should do art. Not support it but do it. I mean be it. Do something so unexpected and cool as to constitute art. The foundation becomes art.

To start out they could give all their money, in a given year, to black people. Not cool enough but getting there. They could have Jeff Koons do it, with blues music playing.

Hell, I don't know. I'm no good at cool, but those intelligent and well-intentioned people can master it, I'm sure. They can't master our runaway government, though. Forget that.  

Crime and Punishment

In the Scandinavian mysteries I've been watching they give someone a ludicrously short jail sentence for killing somebody. Don't they give a shit? That was my reaction, but then I saw it differently.

It means that they understand that society is implicated. It is more individualistic, I soon understood, than the mythological, American view. It sees people as they are, incomprehensible out of context.

And dependent on the circumstances of their lives. Real individualism is rooted in realism. Real individualism understands that autonomy can only exist with a strong social system for support.

Real individualism is about balance.

Marketing Inhumanity

Markets are inhuman. A reverence for markets is a reverence for inhumanity. Inhumanity is hard to market so the fans of inhumanity market markets.

It's the stuff you hear all the time about efficiency. Efficiency only makes sense within a defined, narrow context. The world is wasteful and the universe profligate.

All that energy squandered, converted into another, less palatable form. But then there's the energy that went into making us. We are organizations of atoms.

On the palatability index I don't know where we come in, but we are only organizations of atoms held together by energy, with limited liability and control. 

Ah, that "control" word. Can we enforce palatability? There's no reason to think the cosmos cares or isn't indifferent, but we care, within the limits of our liability.

How is that defined? Not being a deist, I would say arbitrarily. And I would celebrate exactly that, since the deists are failing so miserably. I choose to value us.

I choose to value human life and the systems that sustain us, not markets. Markets don't value life at all, intrinsically, whatever the market deists may say.

A Powerful Insult

It's hard not to write about seeing your country reduced to rubble. The mechanisms are interesting. There are many facets to the thing, some more representative of the inner workings than others, but at one level the absolute purity of the insult is astonishing.

Why? That's the question asked so often, and there is often an answer, but when there is no answer, no tactical or strategic explanation, you are sometimes faced with the realization that it is only a display. They do it sometimes just because they can and want to. 

And they do something that doesn't make any sense specifically to show their power, something so insulting to smash the morale of their adversaries. If this doesn't sound extreme to you, remember, that we're supposed to be ON THE SAME FUCKING SIDE.

The pivotal year here is 1994, when Newt Gingrich's brownshirts showed up in Washington, religious rebels and crusaders, certain of their superiority and rightness. That was the end of civility and reasonable and reasonably effective government. Credit it to Newt. 

We might as well. He will be proud. He has made his mark. The wrecking crew has done what they came for. Our country is ashes, an unrecognizable hulk and burned-out shell. We have no idea whatsoever what we stand for anymore.

Current Resident, or Current Resident

Man, it is mighty hard not to be affected by the social trend of indifference. The message society sends out is that you have to assert your worth. You have to look out for yourself. 

The baseline is that you are a nonentity. You have to prove otherwise. People have no intrinsic worth and so net worth stands in. I think this is bullshit but, whatever.

It is the new ethos of American society. It is disenfranchising and, as good Calvinists, the ruling elite have asserted this same thing in relation to God, saying it's Biblical.

If your life sucks it is because you are unworthy. I revert to "self-evident" in arguing against this. If you aren't out of your mind it is self-evident that it is wrong, but there's the problem.

They, the ruling elite, are out of their minds.

No Trump

One story about Fred Trump stuck in my head. He would tell people that he was Swedish so not to offend his Jewish tenants. No problem, but he probably underestimated his tenants. And reinvention is an honest part of our American tradition, if that isn't weird.

I mean, there's something unavoidably dishonest about reinventing yourself. Maybe it can go in the direction of greater authenticity, but it can sure go in the other direction. Now Donald, the son, doesn't seem to understand that reinvention isn't an end in itself. 

He's in such a constant state of reinvention it would be fair to say there is no Donald, no Trump. He is a means to an end. The end, I suppose, is his image, a kind of hot-air balloon of immense size that he must work frantically to keep inflated. His visage is on it.

But it's not him. There is no him. He is the fulfillment of a trend starting, at the latest, with Ronald Reagan, the actor president, a trend of presidents as pawns or props, on the Republican side. It's hard to imagine a greater non-entity than George W. Bush, but, voila!

They have found him, the Trumpster. It's also hard to imagine greater wreckage than was left by that Bush guy, but there's the potential there in Trump. Republican grandees are salivating, I'm sure. The end of the American state, as we have known it, is at hand.

A Little Analysis

My gift to Donald Trump and his supporters for Christmas is a little rudimentary analysis. They despise Muslims and Mexicans not because they're un-American but because they are American. They're more American than Trump--not saying much. 

Those immigrants are more willing to work, expect less in return, and appreciate the promise of America and the opportunity it represents way more than Trump, the privileged and favored son of an enormous developer. Eureka! I have found it.

Trump's problem: that "son" thing just kills him. He is a successor. Damn, George W. Bush was as well. And Mitt Romney. And John McCain. All of these guys have powerful families. They must have daddy issues. They must all have complexes.

The Muslims and Mexicans are more like those privileged guys' predecessors than they are, but with darker skins. The complexes have something to do with complexions. I'll leave it at that and support any effort to provide an in-house psychiatrist.

At the White House, should a Republican ever reside there again. My work is done here.

Donald Trump's First Christmas Message to the American People, as President

My Fellow Americans:

At Christmas we celebrate who we are, and who we aren't. We aren't Muslims and we aren't Mexicans. We are Americans. I am therefore announcing the creation of a new national day of observance, DEPORTATION DAY, coincident with Christmas.

Every year now, on Christmas, we will have a mass deportation of Muslims, in celebration and in order to send a message. It should also improve security. We will wait a few days and do the same with the Mexicans, since they are at least Christians.

Sort of. Anyway, God Bless You, God Bless America, and Merry Christmas.

Hillary, I Just Can't

I can't vote for Hillary Clinton. I will only vote for her if, when she wins the nomination, she chooses herself as running mate and puts Bernie in as the nominee for president. This may happen in a fit of conscience. In Hillary I see only ambition. I want a reckoning.

I will only vote for someone who tries, at least, to unimplicate us in the right-wing insanity. Without that we go backwards. We keep going backwards, I should say. I'm tired of going backwards. I'm tired of it all. For my entire adult life America has been run by lunatics.

I want my political voice back. Hillary does not speak for me.

Gold Stars for the Robot Boys

Gold stars all around this year for all the robot reporters at Fox and Breitbart and Rush Radio and the other reliable sources of misinformation. They have been good and true servants of their masters.

Weather Report

Once we had the Hippy-Dippy Weatherman, a free spirit. Those were the days. Now we have the Neo-Fascist News Service and the weather is wholly subsumed to it, a pawn in a political game. "It is not raining," says the neo-fascist weather lackey.

As per instruction. "Look out the window, you idiot," says the bewildered bystander. "Well, I'll be darned," says the lackey, but not to the audience. "It is not raining," he says to the audience. The audience believes him because they believe in belief. 

They walk out in the rain and they say it is not raining. It is a powerful poison, the denial of reality. No one dares to disagree, to say otherwise, to admit the truth and risk censure or worse. "It is not raining," they say, now among themselves. It's conformity.

It's compliance. But they actually believe it, eventually, that it's not raining. They believe it's not raining and they're standing out in the rain. Initially they had only believed that you must believe. Now they don't know what they're doing or why they do it.

I don't know how this ends. I think not well. Signing off.

You Can Go Home Again. Ho, Ho, Ho!

What "going home" usually refers to is a return to childhood. Culturally it means a return to the collective childhood of earlier times. You can't recapture the innocence of childhood but you can recapture the absence of responsibility and worry.

At only the cost of your soul. Christ gets us out if this dilemma by extending family feeling, love, to all of humanity and, I would say, to all of creation. It's the best we can hope to do. We accept a new father, God, and get a large, new family in the deal.

We get a diffuse sense of belonging and security. But we also have to accept and own our lives and independence, grow up, and quit trying to withdraw into the aboriginal past, the lure of tribalism, the loss of individual liberty and identity to group affiliation. 

That, tribalism, is the antithesis of Christianity. The challenge for everyone is not to sell your soul for the false security of tribal membership. Faith, Hope and Charity: it isn't all that hard. The greatest of these is the last, the uniting force of God's love.

We celebrate love at Christmas by believing that we are an expression of God's love and more than our matter, more than a meaningless accumulation of atoms, and by hoping to be deserving and to be better. At Christmas we go home.

We go home to our truest selves, our best selves, when we are most aware that we are all in it together, as children of God. May the force of God's love be with you. Merry Christmas. Ho, Ho, Ho!

Responsibility of Reason

If reason and moderation aren't woven into the fabric of a society the society is doomed. Don't get me wrong, irrationality has its place and must be honored.

It must be honored as part of acknowledging the animal aspect of human nature. But the higher stuff better run things or you wind up living, in fact, like animals. 

Not a lot of fun. Especially for the prey. 

The Car Wash at the End of the Universe

That last post gave me an idea. Let's give Donald Trump a car wash to run somewhere. He will probably build it into the biggest chain of car washes ever. It should keep him from mischief for a while.

Adversarial Living

Donald Trump has a lot of people wondering where we went wrong, starting with questioning the validity of his party and the faction within it supporting him. I'm sure they don't wonder or worry about anything. That's the point. They're only defensive and unthinking. 

But from there I wonder about everything: the country, Western Civilization and Christianity, humanity, creation, and the universe since its inception or whatever. This is what Trump can do to you, take you from irritation and stupefaction to universal, existential horror.

The trouble must have started with the mistake of going adversarial with nature, I bet, and thinking that our species is different, special and somehow outside of it. But in screwing-up nature we are screwing ourselves. It has been a suicidal romp culminating in Trump. 

Possibly even that will feed his vanity. His self-importance is qualitatively neutral. He doesn't care what it is as long as he can stick his name on it and feel like a big man. The United States of Trump? He would probably be happy to be known as the biggest anything ever. 

Even idiot, loser or nut-case, as long as he gets the attention. It means he could make us all into losers without a thought. His campaign has caught fire--no, it's on fire, and we're about to be engulfed. Are we having fun yet? It appears that he is, as a spectacle, a car crash.

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.