Indignant Nation

I love indignation. Alan Arkin always did it so well, as in The Russians Are Coming, The Russians Are Coming. Mix it with befuddlement and you've got gold.

But where is it when you need it? We need indignation and we get ennui. And the Russians have come. They're called Republicans.

I'm Shocked

We were warned. We were told that change was accelerating and that each new generation would see more of it than the last. 

That's the quantitative angle. It's the qualitative aspect that has me startled. I was as certain as I could be at one time about us.

I knew what we stood for. All of that is gone. I now doubt my original understanding. I can't make the connection to the mad men we are now. 

Ornery People

There's nothing ordinary about what's going on in America these days, a mass version of insanity and complete moral collapse. This, in the most powerful country in the world. 

Winning is everything. No one cares how you get there so it's not the best and the brightest but the most driven and unscrupulous in control of the structures and systems.

What was left of a veneer of civility is falling away. The roots of the country in Calvinism, a hatred of "the flesh" and a longing for the purification of death, have resurfaced.

Sadly, many good lives are lived within this but it's our Das Boot. Individuals and identifiable groups create contexts where it all makes sense. They have their stories. 

There are trajectories that are responsible and coherent and sane but one day those will all end in an unintelligible mess. Think of the Great Recession but bigger and worse. 

That collapse was created, chaos willed into being by the state-of-nature crowd, ornery people who are reassured by conflict and discord because it is what they believe in.

Welcome to prison-camp USA, a hell-hole run by gangs and thugs where only power matters and goodness lives in the corners and crevices hoping to survive from day-to-day.

There They Go Again

I feel about conservative mass hysteria the way so many of them reportedly feel about socialism. I would have a hard time defining it but I think I know it when I see it.

Actually, the "socialism" thing is a good example of their hysteria. It isn't even remotely a threat to the American state, but conservatives need a huge stable of bogeymen.

So, socialism us a threat. Everything is a threat. They live on threats. They live on resentment and a feeling if superiority, necessarily, stabilizing by-products of their fear. 

They traded in their consciences for certainty. Rationally, there is no certainty so they traded in their brains for fear. One aspect of reason is the ability to weigh things.

It's the ability to separate what's important from what isn't. The war in Iraq is important, just the kind of stupidity that takes down great societies. The war on Christmas isn't.

It isn't important because it doesn't exist.

Banning Homer

At their "funk-works" Republicans are said to plan what they will do when they have fully taken over the world. I understand they will ban Homer Simpson. 

Any and all evidence of Homer's existence will be eradicated. His imagined self will cease to be and all memory of him will wither away over time.

Most importantly all video images of Homer will be destroyed. He is obviously part of a liberal, atheistic, gay-commie plot to weaken America's moral fiber. 

Homer is a horrible role model. He isn't a model at all. Homer represents giving up and giving in to hopelessness and despair. He is that incompetent.

Instead, George W. Bush will be promoted as a model of masculinity. He persevered through every adversity and came through it all without a scratch.

It's a shame the same can't be said for the country but, well, stuff happens.

"The Decline of Western Civilization"

That was only cute when we thought it couldn't happen. 

That Faraway Look

It's not what you think. These guys aren't dreamers. I mean "faraway" as in "nobody home." And I'm thinking of Sean Hannity, Scott Walker and George W. Bush. 

I've heard that the look they have in the eyes is characteristic of fetal alcohol syndrome but, to be fair, it could be from another kind of mental defect. 

Free Birds: It Smells Like Something

And it isn't "teen spirit" but decomposition. The new, fundamentalist-conservative movement needs an anthem, a song suggesting the waste and destruction of a circle of hell out of Dante. 

The essence would be an all-involving sensory experience of decay and decadence, a powerful nasal vortex of denial and delusion and the rotting ideals of our democracy. Let's say Free Bird.

It's a shit song airing infantile fantasies of escapism, a me-first imperative and an anti-social longing for arrestedness. It's all about refusing to grow up and be responsible for anything.

The new conservatives inherited everything and will leave nothing. And, no, they can't change. They are vultures flying away from the bones of our democracy. There's nothing left to eat.

Bathroom Fundamentalists

We see again that conservatives have bathrooms on the brain. They're so literal minded. They have to imagine everything in invasive detail, like gay sex. 

Their asses quiver. Now, in North Carolina, they've guaranteed that the person formerly known as Bruce Jenner will have to report to the boy's bathroom.

Everyone will certainly be more comfortable with that. Maybe Caitlyn will find a Republican there tapping his toes, making for an interesting encounter.

Thom Tillis has tackled the whole hand-washing thing so it's safe to say that North Carolina is first in potty politics, a new slogan for the Old North State.

What's That Gnashing Noise?

Are Republicans grinding their teeth out of guilt? I don't think so. Remember one of our useful points of reference in tracking their malfeasance: selectively weak stomachs. 

Hundreds of thousands of people are dead because a Republican boy-wonder wanted to play with his war toys. Not a problem! They crash the world economy with deregulation.

Aw, shucks. But you soil their honor, suh? Indignant, they will send someone after you, failing to show up themselves because they're too busy running things. Regretfully.

But Trump's war whoops were learned at Cheney-land, a theme park for torturers and sadists, a world domination fun-place. Oh, and about Trump's anti-immigration insanity?

Only some harmless race-baiting and nothing to worry about, they say, while grinding away. If Republicans are grinding their teeth it's only because they might lose an election. 

It's not about guilt or because they care. They can't pretend Donald Trump is some new kind of nut. Not on my watch. They've been cultivating these resentments for years.

Weenie World

I had a very definite understanding of what a "weenie" was when I was a kid. It was an overly fastidious boy, one with a old lady inside, a rule-follower and chicken. 

Again and again I find the new breed of nerdy, rich white guys are weenies. And they are way prickly about their mojos because, well, they don't have any.

They never get to the higher, managerial, parental level of things because they are arrested in adolescence--insecure, needy and overly sensitive about status.

Sound like anyone you know? It's weenie-world at the top now, and even the possibility of a Trump presidency, a weenie-in-chief, means we are doomed.

All I Really Want To Do

I give up. I want it over with. Whatever the Republicans want, let's give it to them. Let them run everything. Let the American people see what it looks like. I can't stand it anymore.

Junior

George W. Bush didn't seem to warrant being credited with agency, a tool if there ever was one and in all respects, but with a little distance it looks different.

Even Republicans were assumed not to want to screw things up the way he did. After all, there was that rescue party of old associates and assorted hacks.

The big man ignored them. Now I think that George, Jr., was the truest son of Lee Atwater, the most amazing piece of shit in the history of American politics.

Atwater was daddy Bush's indispensable hunk of garbage and Junior saw it all in Lee--that he, Junior, didn't have to be like daddy and rate on daddy's terms.

Junior saw that he could outshine the old man or at least make good as a piece of shit and forever get the weight of being a hopeless, mutant blue-blood off his back.

Following Junior there appeared to be the abandoning of that level of recklessness but, no. We see now that it will go on until the country is in the gutter.

George W. Bush was an agent of destruction and a clear, linear part of the larger plan of making the country so weak that only the rich will be left standing.

He's a Brick

All of you have heard, no doubt, the term to brick something, to turn it into a paperweight, as in "oh, Junior bricked his iPad."

Or, in a real-life example, "oh, little Georgie Bush bricked the Middle East, and the world economy, and everything else he touched."

In GOP circles this is considered a useful skill and is encouraged and rewarded. After 40 years of their work our government is bricked.

So, what's up with Donald Trump? Is he a bricker or a brickee or outside the model and goal of petrified government?

The Really Bad Outcome...

has already happened.

Red Herrings on the Grudge Bus

Picture Donald Trump's campaign for president, his magical mystery tour. It must be on a bus. It will be Donald and the not-so-merry pranksters. 

Now that Republicans have actually wrecked the country there's a shift afoot, from happy-talk, their hollow reassurances and impossible promises.

The new tactic, with all the misery they have created, is control of the blame-game. Get ready for a lot of bogeymen, scapegoats and red herrings.

A Man for All Seasoning

To a casual observer Donald Trump seems to need seasoning, but I don't know whether like firewood or food.

Bully for You

Bullying is a kind of privilege. The point of bullying is that the bully won't be treated the way he is treating others, that there are different standards for different people and groups of people.

And differing standards is privilege. So, witness the new conservative nexus of privilege, where the abuse they heap on others is assumed never to work in reverse, never to recoil against them. 

Man, they wouldn't like that, to get back what they've been giving out. Watch Fox News for a while and see. It's the bully's pulpit. And a place from which the golden rule is clearly banned.

Savoir-faire

The Trumpian ticket is savoir-faire, with some je ne sais quoi rooted in his status as an ubermensch. It's hard to capture the guy in normal parlance and lingo, literalism being inadequate to describe the personality stream. The man is a human tweet cascade, a waterfall of incoherent nothingness.

What Does It Mean...

when the crazy people start saying that something is crazy? It means big trouble, I bet. Suddenly, Republicans are discovering crazy, the ones that aren't crazy.

But they were crazy, before, the ones who are saying it's crazy now. How do we know they, the supposed ex-crazies, aren't still crazy? I need a break from this. 

And we all need a break, from Republicans. It's time for their time in the wilderness. Let them be gone. Think of how good it could be, like with the secession of Texas.

It's the stuff that dreams are made of.

Their Kampf

Republicans have such a struggle. They have to make America great again. They have to take back the country. They have to save America from the horror of Obamacare and so on.

It's a struggle to see who gets to own the struggle, who is aggrieved. The Koch boys and their allies, it would seem, are aggrieved. They are plagued by wealth and immense power. 

Koch daddy was insane and a sadist but that's how you get to be a patriot, sucking off the surrogate daddy/state to even it up somehow. And they have to endure the idiot Democrats.

Then they have to struggle against the horrible, poor slobs trying to make it off the nanny-state, not that those people have a grievance, such as being screwed sideways.

The rich and their allies have got the kampf between their teeth and they run with it. They need it. They have to have enemies and, so, worst case, they make them up. 

How handy it is to be able to make stuff up, whenever you want.

No Worries, Muchachos

The North Carolina Tea-Party legislature is bringing Mexican economics to America. Historically, in Mexico, relatively few families of mostly Spanish descent control everything.

Taxes on inheritance and capital gains are nothing or minimal and sales taxes are high, about 16%, so it's incredibly regressive. Tea Partiers, look it up: regressive. Sorry to use big words.

Of course, the position of the state's governing elite, who were bought on the cheap (at) by a discount chain called Rose's, is that it will somehow work out, as with all tax cuts.

Through a miracle and magical thinking cutting taxes on the rich benefits everyone and the overall economy and doesn't create deficits, a Republican perpetual motion machine.

And, if you believe in that...

Trump for Resident

I've decided it's okay if Donald Trump continues to live in the country. But that's as far as I can go. I think it's a fair compromise.

His Way

There are things about which reasonable people can't disagree because it challenges the whole notion that life is intelligible. Surely one of these is that the theme song for Donald Trump's inauguration, as president, must be My Way, with lyrics customized for the occasion. Sing it, Sir!

So what if it sucks 

I don't give a damn

I built it myself

It's all glitz and glam...

Apostle Posse

It puzzles me that Ted Cruz and people like him, whose identities are all tied up in Christianity, worry so much about the morality of other people and so little about their own.

They must feel certain about their salvation. Where they get that certainty and the role of moral enforcer from the Bible I don't know. Look at Judas, the great betrayer of Christ. 

There is no Apostle posse. No one judges Judas and chases him around. Cruz and his fellow Christians should worry a lot more about themselves and lot less about others. 

And they should cut it out with the self-righteousness, criticism and the moral enforcer stuff. Whatever was good enough for the Apostles should be good enough for them. 

Rebuke Cruz

I see that the National Rebuke has endorsed Ted Cruz. Hooray, I say, and good for them. In the Reagan days they could maintain they weren't crazy.

Ronnie was just a boy with a dream. And good hair. And a nice, slightly ruddy, complexion. Reagan had a dream. Really, a delusion. He lived in a dream.

But Ted Cruz is a nightmare. It will catch up with them, the National Rebuke crowd. They will be seen for what they are, our national nut-balls.

Conservatives, I Understand

Conservatives, I understand. You think that something is different now. You think that poor people are now poor because they are immoral and incompetent. 

You think that long ago, let's say, in Jesus's day, it was different because there was scarcity. There weren't enough resources to go around. Poverty was unavoidable.

But we're awash in resources now and only inferior people are poor. Why don't you just say so. It's okay to be mean. You can be smug, self-satisfied assholes. 

I say it's okay but don't pretend you're anything else. Then we can fight it out with you fairly. Which we will, I tell you, but stop lying. Embrace the contempt. 

It suits you.

Personnel Problems

Everyone knows how the bad stuff usually gets done. The people at the top, who order it or set it in motion, are insulated by their distance from the implementation. Their hands seem clean.

The implementers don't feel responsible because they're following orders or falling in line with the intent of the higher-ups. This way horrible things can happen and no one feels responsible.

The Night They Drove Old D.C. Down

It would seem that the Southerners finally have their revenge. They have taken over America and made it more like the Confederacy, that distorted state, than anyone would have thought possible. 

Privilege and property are everything now. The blue-bloods, the old Republican elites, are at last wondering what they got into bed with but it's too late. The racist, bigot-crazies have taken over.

Bonfire of the Vanities

Involuntarily I sometimes have an image of myself as having appeared, dream-like, at a huge bonfire not only apparently commemorating but resignedly celebrating the end of our American culture, whatever it was in the first place.

I wonder if it ever really existed. I can't reconcile what we are now with what I thought we were previously. There's plenty of beer at the bonfire and it's so big it doesn't present as an event, where the crowd has some cohesion, but as a spectacle.

Someone throws a chair on the fire. It seems to represent the sadness and futility of trying to make something decent out of life. If we Americans can fail the way we have it means humanity's problems aren't circumstantial, at root, but inherent in us, our kind.

That's sad but it's a pure, species corollary to the sadness any normal person feels about their own mortality and the utter weirdness of contrasting the importance of your existence to yourself with the incomprehensible extent of our actual inconsequence.

I've always found that awkward awareness lightening and liberating. All the irritating, everyday crap becomes nothing. It all seems like nothing. So now I'm trying to feel that way about our country and species, that it was destined to end and that it's not a big deal.

Live and Let Die

Here we have the conservative and, especially, Trumpian vision for America: they live and they let everyone else die. They'll help the dying along, in fact.

EMERGENCY!

I recall telling one of my neighbors, who is a chemical-phobe, that she needed to make a decision about the Bermuda Grass increasingly infiltrating her vegetable garden.

It would be all or nothing. She needed to attack it or it would take over the garden and destroy it, turning it into a useless monoculture. She eventually used an herbicide. 

It's an emergency, I had to say, to try to get her to understand. It isn't going away and it will mean the end of the garden. Complacency won't cut it. Cooperation is capitulation. Compromise is concession.

Now, THIS IS OUR EMERGENCY MOMENT.

The sirens are going off. The bombs rain down. The enemy is upon us. We need Neo-con d-Con. Roundup for Republicans. Roach motels for Rubios. Agent Orange for O'Reilly. 

We need to crush Rush. I tell you, people, this is it. It is our defining time. We will be remembered for our inaction and incompetence, as it stands. Doing nothing is not acceptable, blundering inexcusable.

It is complicity. It's unpleasant, I know, to take up the fight. Nobody wants to do it but the problem is not going away and it won't fix itself. The conservative menace must be stopped.

Graham, Negative

Lindsey Graham, at last, has come out against Donald Trump and Ted Cruz. He's shocked, he says, shocked to learn that there's gaming going on in the place. Your winnings, sir. 

Add him to the list. Right, yes, it's only been going on, flagrantly, for forty years or more. You live by the crazy, you die by the crazy. Republicans have fanned the crazy flames for decades.

Using leaf blowers, or something. Where were you, Lindsey, when all the insanity went on? What did you do to stop it? George W. Bush! Ring a bell? Who's sorry now. It's too damn late, for us all.

Terabithia? Is That Anywhere Near Terre Haute?

It's way too tempting to think that imaginary worlds are neatly walled off from reality. Everyone's world is to some extent imagined. It can be imagined in a healthy and optimistic way, with some grounding in reality, or be a playground for vanity and insecurity and fear.

The cool thing about accepting the creative aspect of one's outlook is that it can then be managed. If it's creative and subjective and chosen it might as well be productive and pleasant. The way things are seen, in other words, isn't about establishing objective truth. 

There is no objective truth. Not at our level of discernment. It's all muddled. So the way things are viewed is more a matter of belief and expectation. Seeing nastiness has little to do with discerning it but a lot to do with its creation, helping to will it into existence. 

Ronald Reagan's imagined world was pleasant. But it was exclusive. It was pleasant only for his clan of insiders. It was contemptuous of everyone else. That's the world Republicans have been creating by believing it already existed: judgmental, segregated and polarized. 

It's an unpleasant place and we're stuck in it. It's a sham world created by power-hungry people.

What a Boner!

What a boner Donald Trump must have at this point. And Hillary, too. It's all about them, their egos and ambitions. What about us?

Bernie really cares about us, more so than anyone in a long time. That's what I think. No boner there. It's actually a job, the presidency.

It's not an audition to be an icon. It's not supposed to be. No hard-on, maybe, but Bernie's got a bigger dick than those others.

Bernie's a man.

People's Strengths and Weaknesses...

are different aspects of the same attributes.

Ad Maiorem Mei Gloriam

One problem when someone identifies with God is that their interests become indistinct from God's. As a group evangelicals excel at this. 

But Antonin Scalia did it as well. The result is moral blindness. Such a person can do all kinds of harm and never look back. That is Scalia's legacy. 

He promoted himself and no one else. 

A Paler Shade of White

The Republican Party is the pale-faced party and getting paler all the time, ensuring the inevitability of their own demise.

But what will be left? Not much, probably. They are too envious to care. They would rather leave nothing than lose control.

Tarzan-sans

Get ready for the loin-cloths. Trump's, of course, will be shiny-gold and snazzy as hell and encrusted with jewels and have his name on it, front and back. These white guys were parachuted in among the heathen as infants and, of course, their genetic excellence and superiority are now manifest and they are swinging through the trees while the rest of us dance around a fire chanting gibberish and living in the sub-prime squalor we deserve.

Thank God for those white men, in the forest canopy above, giving us a glimpse of their goodness as we see them from the depths of our inferiority, looking up into their furry... Oh, shit! TM-something! And, you know, I've got a bunch of earthy friends down here, in the forest-slums and, well.... You can't help but notice. No wonder Trump and his team are greasing the trees. The last thing they want is to have to compete with us.

Welcome to Hell

The "prosperity gospel" movement, apart from the heresy, is an unbelievable insult to common sense and decency. Its proponents believe that God showers good things on the faithful.

And they have found their man, their shot at legitimacy and the big time. It's Donald Trump. You see, the way to be sure of God's favor is when someone is rich and it can't possibly be by merit.

Then it must be by God. That's the simple reasoning. Enter Donald. He isn't good. He isn't competent. He isn't anything. He's an utterly worthless person. He must have been favored by God. 

The Nice Nazi

Hearing anybody eulogize Antonin Scalia makes me ill. He was a Nazi. He was a person for whom ideas took precedence over people.

He believed in authority. He believed in strength. He believed in himself. In that last he was a fascist in a non-fascist role, a purveyor of personality.

He believed in a national personality conveyed in the Constitution and known to him to the point of identification, so he was yet another racist.

His sense of rightness came from a quality rooted in his being, that is, not from thinking rightly. He was a prophet interpreting a religious text.

He was smart as hell but it was used only to serve his masters, the lords of the flat-earth, who reckon that what you see is what there is. 

So he was a literalist, the Constitution's equivalent of Biblical fundamentalists, destroyers of meaning. He was all law and no spirit. 

He was a fucking monster. 

Booger Nights

If we are doomed to a Trump presidency I at least want to make some money on it. It's what he would do. It's what Republicans have been doing for years. 

I'll make a movie about the man. It will be a mash-up of Boogie Nights and Saturday Night Fever, what with the swagger and the hair. No doubt Trump will play himself.

Disco Donald--there you have it, a fool for dancing and he's well financially endowed. He's in slick clothes with moves to match. Always the center of attention, our little Donnie. 

Another Brick in the Wall

Cruz. Rubio. Trump. 

What does it matter.

They're all bricks in a wall.

Restoring Our Strength

My theme song for Bernie Sanders is Let's Work Together. Here's a version:

https://m.youtube.com/watch?list=RDwGGW4IezbC4&params=OAI%253D&v=wGGW4IezbC4

La Scalia

For some symbolic reason I always pictured Antonin Scalia in a frumpy, older wool sweater with some pilling and with his hair somewhat unkempt and staticky and with a little crustiness at the corners of his mouth, and with floating dust and smoke visible around him in soft, streaming light--a vision of fuzz and scuzz in dicey resolution contrasting with the sharpness of his mind. That latter is acknowledged by everyone. Now in the vision he is dead on a wooden floor. Everything else is the same.

I can't see him differently. The guy had a problem. The mental acuity was not counterbalanced but made possible by moral and scholarly frumpiness--an imperative to see things as they weren't--because his kind of consistency and exactitude can only exist in an abstract and imaginary world. He had to believe in certainty where it wasn't, in clarity where it isn't and in definitive answers where they aren't. I guess it was out of fear and a Manichean mindset, that it's authority or chaos. 

It's a bit right-brain and creative and more traditionally feminine, in the way that Catholicism is all of these, and less strictly scientific and analytical. His analyses were Jesuitical and Socratic. He could defend anything, and did, because his reason was in the service of the greater glory of something else and not independent and accountable. This is all well enough but it's un-American. It's rationalization. It's validity depends wholly on the initial insight. It depends on the man himself.

And he was wrong.

Nothingness. Oblivion. Ah, Hope.

Donald Trump. Ted Cruz. Ah, Bernie Sanders.

Streams of Conservative Consciousness

There are identifiable elements in the new conservativism. The money and privilege faction is one. Another is comprised of evangelical Christians and their allies. A third is authoritarian.

The money crowd thinks they were born better, the evangelicals that they were pre-chosen, and the authoritarians that the world embodies justice--that power is goodness.

What they have in common is racism. 

Texas. It's a Mess.

Please, please, please. Secede!

If Ever I Should Leave You

The most terrifying thing about the leading three candidates for the presidential nomination, on the Republican side, is that Donald Trump is the least terrifying. 

If there was ever a time to leave the United States this is it. 

The Munchurian Candidate

Ted Cruz is back on top, a brainwashed psychopath intent on the realization of his vision of the United States as a proto-communist dictatorship. How so? For Cruz the class struggle is subsumed to the Darwinian struggle for survival, the class struggle being but one, corporate aspect of the brutal, state-of-nature situation into which God has plunged humanity for His inscrutable reasons. 

It's inscrutable because of the inconsistency of the position that life is a punishment and a test with a known outcome. Cruz and his cabal of conservative, neo-confederate followers and other adherents to Calvinist precepts are believers in predestination, a disavowal of free will. And, yet, they soldier-on as though it matters, as though there are indeterminate outcomes in a determinate world, and as though God's omnipotence somehow falls short in the endowing of free will.

Cruz was brainwashed at a young age and is unaware of the goals of his programmers, the overthrow of the U. S. government in favor of a totalitarian, religious state. His unconscious mind, abetted by conscious elements, rebels on his behalf in trying to assert free will with a cry for attention by fabricating national ailments, made-up self-diagnoses, such as homosexual gangrene, health insurance leprosy and debt dementia. It's all proxy and projection, an indirect and encoded message.

The moral decay imputed to society is his, but his megalomania and ambition have resulted in misdiagnosis on a national scale. In fact, this behavior is a disorder in itself, a syndrome, and is creating other maladies through its strength and its virulence, the neurosis having infected an entire political party and overwhelmed several Southern states, including Texas, his home. His family is deeply implicated in the delusion and its compulsion and will surely never recover. 

The fear of censure and retribution will ensure it even if there should be some glimpse of reality, the family members having witnessed, more so than anyone, the father's determination and violent, persecutory fantasy life, as seen in his interest in the death penalty, deportation and other punitive measures. He is determined that we become his national family--he the papa figure, the president, and we the national hostage-children. What a fate in a democracy!