War Can Be Good For You

Firstly, you have to survive. Beyond this the common effort entailed in wartime is the kind of thing we should do all the time. And by common I mean everybody. 

It doesn't work otherwise. The idea is not to make war on someone else but to fight to make life worthwhile for everyone, meaning all of humanity and creation.

Anything else is suicidal, unproductive and shortsighted. Generally people don't have enough of a sense of urgency or what they have is misplaced and selfish.

We need urgently to take care of one another and the systems that sustain us. Whatever kind of a weird gift it is, our lives on this planet, it is what we have.

Bride of Trumpenstein

In order to understand Trump's missionary position on women I look at his wives. Not a wife has been remotely his equal. And most have been foreign and so less likely to see that he is a joke and a loser.

They would be less adept at cultural clues, that is. Ivana, however, got uppity by not understanding her real role as an appendage. To Trump women are only an expression and extension of his power.

Our country would be down to this if he were elected president, in which case we better not be uppity. There's no telling what he might do. He will not stand for anything independent, assertive or unattractive. 

We would be a part of his brand. America would have to be nicely made-up and "beautiful" and present well on his arm. It wouldn't matter if everything were utterly rotten and unusable underneath. 

Nose Rings for Republicans

I am not confrontational. I am a peaceful person. My idea of a protest is when people show up in colorful costumes and stand around.

But these are different times. I have been fantasizing about going to a Trump rally and trying to make a statement, most recently by selling nose rings. 

At one time we elected people who thought like us. Then we elected people to think for us. Now we want people who don't think at all.

Along for the Ride

When I have a nervous, passenger-side driver in my Miata I tell them they might as well relax and enjoy their last minutes of life if I'm about to get them killed.

I try to have that attitude about the Republicans running everything, seemingly into the ground. Life is good but it's hard to ignore the feeling of impending doom.

Where Entitlements Really Go

If the less fortunate in America are such experts at taking advantage of government largesse how is it that they don't have anything? 

And how is it that the divide between rich and poor began its slide into extremity with the coming of Reaganomics and Republican rule?

It all makes sense when you look at it. We know who the real takers are. Republicans have been playing the government and sucking off the American people for decades.

I remember someone saying, at the time of the Rodney King trouble, that if you want to see real looting look at the Savings and Loan scandal. 

So right. No wonder Republicans are defensive, with so much to hide. And they only want more. Or, at least, for there never to be a reckoning.

Triumpalism

As a limiting case himself, Donald Trump makes it easier to see the assholes around us. Is it my imagination or did Americans once have a conscience? 

When did it become passé to care? Anyway, weenies like Trump are everywhere, playing the system and trying to convince themselves of their worth.

They overreact to everything, being weenies. They are devastated by any slight or small failure and their triumphalism is boundless at any success.

The Fifth Column: the Evil Forces of the Right Wing

I just read some more drivel which tried to analyze the latest misadventures of the Republicans. It came with all kinds of caveats and conditions and partial conclusions. There is an explanation. It makes sense of everything: Republicans are evil and completely out of their minds.

That O'Reilly Fucker

Around my house a certain cable news show is known as That O'Reilly Fucker or Spin Cycle.

The Reassignment Scam

Republicans seem to think that transgender people are play-acting and therefore gender-inauthentic. I would make a similar case against Evangelical Christians, who were clearly born Satanists and chose reassignment in order to conceal themselves and for the perks of accepted religious status, such as social respect and tax-evasion.

They should be forced to use the church of their birth, the Church of Satan. It is easy to see that the evangelicals have the inborn character of devil-worshippers from a quick look at naked values. An analysis comparing core Christian precepts with the ethics of evangelicals gives a predictable result, that they are working for the other guy.

This is the real reassignment scam. What motivation does anyone have to undergo difficult, unnecessary surgeries? The Satanists, however, are known to be motivated by a quest for power and the reassurance of injustice, complementary things. Injustice and arbitrary power are exactly what evangelicals pursue in attacking vulnerable people. 

Lift and Separate

Donald Trump has delivered such a blow it lifted the Republican Party right off its feet and they are settling into different camps now and still sorting themselves out.

The Palinites are furring up to Trump. John Boehner and the country club, smokey-drunks are hanging desperately onto their fumy, failed ethos and opposing Trump.

We are seeing which groups knew that they were jerks to begin with and which didn't. Those who knew immediately embraced Trump, the master of the martial art of fuck-you.

Those who still held onto the delusion that Republicans represented anything other than greed, racism and a national death wish are stupefied. It's a hard time to be rational. 

Sane, caring Americans are involuntarily witnessing a half-ass pro-wrestling match, strapped to their chairs, and undergoing intense emotional pain and ethical despair and exhaustion.

Sphincter Asset Management

At Sphincter the primary investment vehicle is called the Tight-Ass Trust, which employs a digestive algorithm. They operate out of a renovated warehouse called The Closet, within which there is a small, neatly appointed suite of offices known informally within the organization as doily-world. 

Tea is served there religiously at three, for the partners. The investment philosophy at Sphincter is pessimistic. It assumes that the easy money is over and that it's time to get retentive. Sphincter's associates are famously risk averse but prone to emotional outbreaks of adventurism, or "acting out".

It is thought that acting-out is another sad spectacle of overpaid geeks trying to find a mojo. Sorry, boys. Those who have one don't have to look. They are, however, usually rational and practical and understand that the only way real pussies make money is to play the system. That is what they do.

Catholics: The Best Cannon Fodder Ever

Apart from the hideous WASP at the helm Fox News is a deeply Catholic organization. The training in obedience and blind allegiance to authority come in very handy at Fox.

The Bad Shepherd

Republicans were fine turning their share of the electorate into sheep and imbeciles until Trump came along. Now they whine and whine and whine.

"He stole our sheep." Well, tough.

Let Us Pray

Several times I have been to Gethsemane, the monastery in Kentucky, and I thought that the monks could see current events more clearly because of their distance from them. Thomas Merton saw that the defining issue in America is race. 

We will conquer it or be consumed by it. What is it like to die? Picture dying with the awareness of it and with regret because the meaning of your own life and life in general is being challenged as it happens, incidentally or otherwise.

Race has put us there. For those who aren't in denial, or shock, we are witnessing our own death. Merton understood that the issue of race in America required a transformation. It was a crossroads. We could not go on as we were.

We would be transformed as a people or die. Unchallenged and unchanged we would fail and that meant dissolution into moral misery and degradation. The issue could not be withdrawn. And we have taken the wrong road and are dying. 

It may be inadvertent and it's three-dimensional, at least. The road not taken travels the wrong road with us. We are prodigals with the hope of transformation always at an elbow. It is always an option and inadvertence isn't an excuse. 

Injustice can demand to be addressed and denial is hard work. It is wearing us out. There's lightness and grace in the transformation and if we can get a glimpse of it, well, it might be self-reinforcing and keep on happening. 

Meanwhile, as the monks would do, let us pray. The wages of sin are upon us.

Horror

Let's view it as a learning opportunity. I didn't know it was Ted Cruz who really terrified me until he quit, for example. He's a horror greater than which it is impossible to imagine. 

I couldn't have thought up someone as terrifying as Cruz. I still can't and he actually exists. I can't comprehend the horror of Ted Cruz. The other guy, the survivor--what's his name?

The presumed nominee is kind of a joke. Republicans have such a thirst for tabloid entertainment. In this series, Survivor: The Republican Primaries, what-his-name has won.

The final ceremony, coronation, or whatever awaits. And a general election version may be in the works. Couldn't we stick them on an island? The winner could then rule that.

Puerto Rico? Running our country is an important job, we seem to have forgotten. But maybe Cruz's or some God will pity us and we will survive this mess, not that we deserve to.

Exit Strategy

We probably ought to have an exit strategy. An exit strategy for America. I mean, we may have to abandon the place, what with Trump.

Damn, but where do we go? We may have to think big. Go global and interplanetary. Why stop there? Let's make it existential, or supernatural.

That's interesting. I've wound up in the same place as the religious fanatics, fantasizing about an unseen world. Maybe that was their plan.

They want to bring us all to Jesus because we are afraid for our lives. Truthfully, I'm not afraid of Trump. He's an opportunist, not an ideologue. 

He's nowhere near as scary as Cruz. But I'm very afraid of the people who vote for Trump. And I have no idea how to get rid of them.

Or Die

It appears I will become an old white person. Either that or die.

It's the most horrible demographic ever. I think death should be an option.

For now I just hide.

We Have Guts

Republicans campaign and govern from the gut and Ted Cruz has thrown in the bowel. Gut-government has made Democrats attackable and impeachable for anything, like winning, or nothing, and Hillary has a lot of baggage since she was already a winner by marriage. 

Nobody really likes her, and American voters have been held hostage for so long by Republicans they have Stockholm syndrome en masse and are unreliable. And Trump has turned the entire election cycle into a reality show. Oh, this will be interesting, but messy.

What To Do at a Coup

Most mornings I wake up to the innocence of a new day. I can say that I'm living the life I have chosen and, though some things have turned out unexpectedly, I am very fortunate and I feel it. In the moment I am happy. Then, breakfast. Ah, the pleasure of food. 

But, as I head out, my mood changes. Am I in a foreign country or what? Have we been invaded? Tell me, how do you get from where we were, or were assumed to be, to Donald Trump? I've had a sense of dysfunction since Nixon but it was, well, kind of normal.

It didn't challenge everything. Trump challenges everything. Trump isn't operating within an intelligible context he is challenging the whole context. This means that we are witnessing a coup or a crackup or a breakdown. What do you do at a coup? Hors d'oeuvres?

It is too weird for words.

Grey Gardens

Sometimes things are so out of sync it's impossibly sad. It can quell any impulse you have to fight it or fix it or flee or even to numb yourself somehow. All you can do is look at it and feel the sadness. When I first saw the movie Grey Gardens, in the 1970s, I felt that. 

The Beales of Grey Gardens, Big Edie and Little Edie, mother and daughter, were at best impractical. Did they have to live in such squalor? Was it a choice? Probably, more rightly, it was an external expression of an internal state, removed from the norm, though Little Edie alluded once, if I remember, to a diagnosis of schizophrenia. And they had family. There were sons and brothers somewhere. How could they let them live in such a mess? 

And what did I do?

Not about the Beales, I mean, but about my sister. She died in New York City, in 2010, in squalor. She was brilliant but difficult: hugely intelligent and talented and impossible to live with. She coped with the tough, improbable life she had made for herself, again an external expression of an off-beat, disconnected internal state, with resiliency but it seemed so unnecessary. People don't have to live like that.

Oh, but they do.

I think that there was unwarranted optimism once, that there would be the equivalent of a Salk vaccine for everything. 

We would be able to fix everything. It's an attitude that dies hard and is characteristic of a kind of American optimism compounded by innocence. We are still dealing with the fallout of that false optimism. There's a resistant strain of it around, that you can still fix anything if you have enough money, but even that is failing as so many aging people live in pain and lose more function than they thought possible. 

The scientists and medical people now know that, with so many things, there are statistical distributions, often normal curves, and that there will always be people out in the tails. The crazy will always be with us, and so on. People will always have problems, many unfixable, or new problems arise as others fade. But what does it mean? I was taught, when I was a child, that people who suffer somehow suffer for all of us. 

They bear a burden for all of us. How is this not true? It means that it is true. We are a people, a common entity of sorts. When we care for other people we care for ourselves. When we neglect them we neglect ourselves. And I neglected my sister. Was she crazy? It doesn't matter. Who are we to judge. I didn't know how bad her life was. Would I have helped her if I'd known? Yes, but only if it was really necessary and with conditions.

My brother and I had never known how she made a living. She was guarded about it, but she was an intermediary in the sex industry. This immediately impressed us as an honest thing in the context and as characteristically defiant. In Summer, 2007, I had visited New York and hadn't contacted her. It may have been better. As it happens, I saw the stage version of Grey Gardens while there, with Christine Ebersole as Little Edie.

And I was at Marie's Crisis, a piano bar with ties to Broadway, when Ebersole won a Tony for her performance. I had wondered what it would be like to take my sister there. She was a singer. Would either of us have gotten anything out of it? I will never know. The Beales may have been happier than I am. My sister probably wasn't but this is the thing, with these strange worlds people create, some more invented than others.

There's always a qualitative cast to it. The Beales' world was in some ways beautiful. My sister's probably wasn't. But all of this makes me think of the disconnect in the way we Americans now view ourselves, in a romantic way even in relation to past standards, as we abandon any sense of who we are and what we stand for. And it's becoming more delusional by the day, more reflexive and a reflection of something lost.

Our national sense of self is a crumbling mansion. We are increasingly out of touch with reality, unable to step back and see the mess in the trappings of past successes, and there's increasingly less connection between our view of ourselves and what we are. The longer it goes on the more defensive we are and resistant to the truth. It's also less likely that we can recover and again be more of what we claim to be. That's impossibly sad.

In honor of my sister, a sample of her singing:

The Collective

For those of you who watch Star Wars it's interesting how much Republicans resemble the Borg. There's a robotic, shared-consciousness aspect to the new Republicanism. They will also sacrifice themselves for a cause. It's a shame it's the wrong cause.

Our, American tradition is to sacrifice individualism only for a real threat and temporarily. Republicans had been trending another way--to achieve political power by thwarting individualism and inventing threats. And more so after the dramatic attack of 9/11.

There was no real threat. Some hicks sucker-punched us, as hicks are prone to do. Every culture has a backward element. We stupidly responded in-kind and on their, tribal terms, for reasons of Republican self-interest. What an utter failure of our system.

Catchy Phrases

We turn now to catch phrases for the candidates, vaporous bits of nothingness, slogans that still capture the essence of a candidacy. 

For Cruz: Death to the Infidels! or Slay the Heathen!

Remember, this applies firstly to his fellow citizens.

For Trump: Roll the Dice with Me!

This sounds like an invitation to gamble with Trump but it is ambiguously clever. It is an invitation to gamble on Trump. That way, he has deniability. If the world explodes on his watch he can say we knew the risks. It is how he already does business.

And for Hillary: It Could be Worse!

The Reapers

What, exactly, is a hedge fund? Hedge funds are bubbles within a boom-and-bust economy, islands of concentrated unreality. Someone can usually live on borrowed time for a while.

Hedgers apply a multiplier to that. They go exponential on it. That is a hedge fund: three-dimensional racketeering, stereoscopic theft and postal exploitation. And it's risk-reduced and insured by us. 

The profits come from us. The hedge-fund people are grim reapers. They find value and extract it within a system that has been prejudiced in their favor over time. They are insulated.

It's a game to them, grim because many non-hedgers' lives are ruined as part of the game. The practitioners are insulated from any sense of involvement or responsibility or engagement. 

Borrowed time is stolen life. Vampires live like this. Human life doesn't matter among the hedgers, not with the pressure for profits. Vampires are envious. They want more of life than they are given.

The hedge-fund guys are financial vampires and will take whatever they can get from anywhere, no matter what the consequences are to anyone or even themselves, longer term.

Even Ants...

have "Oh, Shit!" moments. I can see this as I fight with them for control of my kitchen.

They scurry from the thumb of doom.

This reminds me so much of our right-wing. They are against individualism and all about conformity.

Everyone must agree with them. Dissent is not an option. If you resist them you will be destroyed.

They only care about their collective, but they do scurry. There's a hint of individualism there somewhere.

Your Daddy's Rich

Clearly we are going to have another son of a wealthy father heading the Republican presidential ticket.

 

Is this all that they can cough up, beneficiaries of inherited wealth? Inheritance must be such a thing with them. 

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.