Cruz-Flanagan, 2016

It's already Hail-Mary time among the Republicans. John McCain needed crazy credentials and a woman. Voila! Sarah Palin. 

Ted Cruz needs uncrazy and corporate-friendly credentials and a woman. Aha! Carly Fiorina. But he could have chosen me. 

I would have really balanced him out:

I believe in reason, not revelation.

I don't like blowing things up.

I will provide jobs--in our country.

I want better wages and working conditions.

I will build infrastructure--in our country.

I believe that people have rights even after they are born.

I am more feminine in outlook than Fiorina.

Ted, I am willing to talk his through with you. I can save you from yourself and your falsely perceived destiny as a suicide bomber for Christ, chosen to obliterate the apostate, materialistic, godless government of our country.

Feel it, Ted. The weight is lifting from your shoulders. 

See the light of reason--God's reason, as it happens. You can be saved, Ted, truly saved, and live a life as described in the Bible and promoted by Christ, a life of love and integrity and caring for others.

But this can only happen if you choose me.

The Upper Crust

I just watched an episode of an English mystery series and the head of the manor did it. I don't know where the butler was. 

The assumptions of privilege were well-portrayed. The noble family couldn't imagine that they would have to answer to anyone for anything.

Accountability was outside of their experience. They had never encountered it, like the latest generation of our conservatives. 

It's so deep, the assumption of exclusivity, that they are indignant or uncomprehending when confronted with consequences.

They have never known consequences. This is a problem of upbringing, a failure of education and socialization. They were poorly raised.

The Trump Conundrum

If, in his better moments, he doesn't think he's not fit to be President he's not fit to be President.

Moving On Up

Black folk's fantasies about a better life may have to go other-worldly again. Swing that chariot low. They aren't going to get any justice in this world, not with the white boys in charge and the racist resurgence.

https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=Ft7lIotNTHo

Roaming in the Gloating

There may be a bunch of Democrats somewhere gloating over the implosion of the Republican Party but it's their funeral. Donald Trump filled their void.

That sounded bad. You know what I mean. Trump walked into a space left empty by Democrats because they didn't have the stomach for the fight. 

Now it's too late. Gloat away, anyone with a taste for it. It's all our funeral.

Where to Go

Thank God for predictable digestion. I never have to use public bathrooms. I have my breakfast, with coffee, take a shit and go to work. I'm good for the day.

But for those less intestinally blessed things are getting more complicated. I can't believe it's an issue, what with various Republican murderers running around free.

This is how they do it. They keep you always on your heels by attacking on all fronts and you get bogged down and demoralized while they kill and steal.

They kill and steal while we argue about bathrooms and Bruce Jenner. Underlying it all is their assumption of moral superiority and the willingness to attack us.

Back in the day, of course, it was their religious conviction that segregation was ordained by God. White was right. Now might is right, money and power.

It's the same old stuff, the new racism. The old ways don't die hard they are unkillable.

Thumb-Smashed

For the first time I'm fighting ants in my house and the little guys keep coming. I leave the thumb-smashed corpses of their comrades around as a message. 

But they don't get it. It's both admirable and stupid, kind of like us in the Middle East.

A Mighty Wind

North Carolina has never been first in anything, except maybe as the source of more lung cancer than anywhere. The Wright Brothers, with characteristic sense, investigated and learned where they would find the best winds for flying their gliders. 

It was North Carolina.

When the winds weren't needed the Wrights went back to Dayton and stayed. Now North Carolina is senselessly pioneering repression and becoming a haven for bigots, an Afghanistan for the NASCAR brand of racist honkey. Recall Jesse Helms.

For decades sensible people have discounted guys like Helms as unrepresentative of anything, a tenacious toe fungus on a political foot. We expected this of Alabama and Mississippi and two or three other states comprising the nation's idiot uncle. 

But North Carolina? What many citizens don't see is the lowest-common-denominator thing in operation, that the idiot uncle is running everything and has been, the weakest link and missing link that gets its way because it must be cared for.

Actually, the idiot uncle, the neo-Confederate South, is our North Korea.

The region is retrenching as a racist substate, incapable of seeing to itself and its citizens. It's criminally deranged, with a history of leeching off other entities, racial or geographic. Let's let the uncle fester and fend. Well, now we'll have to pry the sucker off. 

It's the Republican political linchpin, the source of their evil power, with political nukes and terrorist tendencies. And, North Carolina, please quit pathetically claiming to be first in anything. You're now a disgrace: first, perhaps, only in malfeasance. 

Dear Suh:

Dear Governor McCrory:

You have shown that you can't govern the state. It's possible nobody can but you still need to resign. You had your chance and blew it. Go play golf. Hang out with your rich, ass-kissing friends. Go to church and pray to Jesus. We all know that incompetence never has consequences for conservatives so you can have a great time with all your cronies and crackpot friends.

Kiss-Me-gate

Donald Trump is just a boy who wants a big smooch from the whole world.

Uh-oh. No! Yikes! Watch out! It's his ass! 

Coming Events: The "Too Big For His Britches" Fantasy Tour

If Donald Trump wins the Republican nomination for president what ensues will be interesting. No doubt not even Donald knows. He's improvising everything.

Most politicians are as programmed as their handlers can make them. One gaff and you're gone. But Trump's loose-cannon review is gaff-proof and un-programmatic. 

And he's not a sickness but a symptom, a mirror held up to a suck-ass country in way more trouble than it knows. He's an arrested id-savant riding a really big wave. 

We've had trouble with dignity before and played the hicks, but nothing like this. 

Seven Ways to Deal

Finding ways to deal with the anguish of watching Republican assholes destroy the world is hard. The following have been tested and are approved of by me:

Food (better is better)

Luau, with tiki torches (sixties style; kitschy)

Drink (alcoholic)

Finnish Sauna (a cure for everything)

Sex (the cure for everything)

Sleep (ah, forgetfulness)

Writing (about Republican assholes--works sometimes)

Kick Ass, Jesus

Be like Jesus. And kick ass. How is it our kids don't all turn out crazy, with the messages we give them. You know, though, I remember it made perfect sense to me, growing up. 

Or it didn't. Why worry about it. Self-contradiction seemed normal to me. What's crazy is trying to resolve everything. And it's prideful. Human limitation won't have it.  

So there's insanity in the drive for personal consistency, because it's impossible.

Chorus Line

Somebody tell me--you out there with the psychology degree--why I keep picturing our Republican nabobs carrying on like a gay men's chorus, right out of Busby Berkeley.

A whole, florid, song and dance routine. The Democrats are film-noire, practical and serious. I see it now, that the Dem's are drudges and that Republicans are escapists.

It must be a deep thing, with roots in religion, cynicism and fatalism. Republicans are into denial and at-odds with life. Who cares, except they insist that everyone live their way.

Meanwhile, enjoy the show. There will be plenty to escape from before it's over.

Maginot Republicans

The blue-blood, red-neck coalition, of screwers and screwees, is as odd a thing as you will find. With Trump we have a rich boy successfully playing to the rednecks.

On the Maginot scale of isolationism it's ranking pretty high. We are as well-knit into the world economy as we can be but workers think the net flow of goodness is now out.

It is for them but not for the rich folks. That comes later. And, since the rich are oblivious to everyone but themselves, we are seeing some conflict. The rich just want more.

When they say "America" they mean themselves. When they say "freedom" they mean theirs. When they squander money it's ours and usually to their benefit. They are a class. 

They envision an "America" with themselves in golf carts and everyone else caring for them in a servile way. They think they are being generous by employing anyone at all.

The rednecks vote for this out of ignorance. But exceptionalism, to which most Americans at least unconsciously subscribe, is racist so the roots of the trouble are everywhere.

We have become an unwitting empire and our time is up. We are on the downslope of the cycle of empires. The rich think they can weather anything. Maybe they can.

But Trump has turned their methods back on them. They don't know what he will do and they got used to being able to buy the government. See how they squirm.

Proto-Trump

How do you know what's proto-? You must infer it back from when you get there, wherever it is you were going before you knew it. Take Trump.

I mean, who knew? Pre-presidential he seemed like kitsch, something that plays off of something else and has a surrogate, cheesy status.

Herr Donald embraces inauthenticity to the point of being authentic about it, an exaggerated case of something inauthentic to begin with, being his own hawker.

It's hard to get a handle on, the layers of inauthenticity. Now the Republicanism of the past 50 years all looks like proto-Trump. They cultivated this. Look at Reagan. 

Look at Nixon and the Bushes. Appearance is everything. Reality is whatever you can spin it into. It gives you Trump, the spin-master and man of illusion.

He's obviously, overtly about ten un-American things at once and it passes as patriotism. Wow, we are kitsch, our entire country: exaggerated, cheesy and inauthentic.

What an odd feeling, like being a shell of yourself.

Ceteris Paribus

The Ceteris Paribus assumption gets unconsciously used all the time. Someone thinks they will be happier with more money, for example. Which they will, in an instant.

But it will not last. It's a simplifying tactic, removing from consideration all other variables, including time. It assumes everything outside the model stays the same.

Which is nonsense, but it's empowering nonsense. And it's grasping nonsense, taking things for granted in order to try to get understanding or control. That's not all bad.

But the larger context shouldn't be forgotten. Eve wants the apple. She's narrowed her vision down to the apple and thinks it will make her happy. Okay, she's got the apple. 

Oops. The price was paradise.

Forget Smart

You would think we would at least aspire to intelligence. Is that too much to expect?

It is, of the Tea Party/Trump people.

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.