Sub-Ordinary People

The Trump cohort and cabinet is looking like a lot of throwbacks and knuckle-draggers. Remember those Southern sheriffs during the fight for desegregation?  Welcome our new attorney general, Jeff Sessions, an unrepentent racist of the baiting type. He'll toe the line of deniability while doing everything he can to return us to the days of white supremacy. 

A Loyal Public Servant

Well, now, Jeff Sessions is an interesting choice for Attorney General. No one can question that he is a loyal public servant--of the Confederate States of America.

Self-Negation

Everything about the modern Republican hegemony is self-negating. At its core is cynicism about humanity and civilization and a belief in barbarism. It's grounded in fear and a need for unnecessary risk and an unconscious death wish, the hidden nihilism of the country-clubs and evangelical churches. 

We are a playground of Europeans turned loose on a continent of unexploited natural resources without adult supervision. In Trump these children have chosen the parent of their dreams, someone to reassure them that they never have to grow up and that someone else will always pay the bills.

The Poison

In order to have a healthier and happier country Americans have to move money downwards in the system. The ongoing concentration and movement upwards poisons everything. Everybody loses when money moves upwards because wealthy people eventually kill off the relatively affluent consumers they need to buy the shit they produce. That's right--in our country everyone is supposed to have a stake. Sorry, it's so easy to forget.

Deep-Down...

I bet even Donald Trump thinks the American people are stupid for electing him. 

Well-Sized

Now that he's elected I'm reassured to think that Donald Trump has a reasonably well-sized dick. But he's a notorious exaggerator and put the issue into play himself.

Shouldn't it be independently verified? I mean, how could he defend our honor, internationally, otherwise. And those other leaders had better measure up, dick-wise.

Our boy Donald will take them out with his swagger.

Confidence Trickster

Trump's bravado and boastfulness are not rooted in confidence but compensation. His swagger belies his essential smallness.

Personal Defects

Donald Trump ran a very defective campaign but his timing was perfect. Those who most accurately predicted the outcome didn't even consider the candidate, only other factors.

So he won in spite of himself. But try to convince him of that.

Appointments in Gehenna

Any hope that Trump would appoint competent, qualified, rational people to his administration is quickly dissipating.

Revenge of the White People

There's an aspect of anger and revenge in the election of Trump. The working class and religious voters who supported him like the feeling of risking everything. They feel that they have nowhere to go but up, taking a lot for granted, and would love to see wealthier people take a hit.  It was a "fuck you" vote and an unproductive and self-defeating way of asserting themselves and blindly lashing out.

Speaking of Appointments...

Trump seems to be construing his victory as an indication if his greatness. So, if the transition is a mess and he cavorts with and chooses lunatics as appointees and advisors it is--guess what--not a problem because his majesty is already manifest.

Whatever he does it is a success by definition and independently of the consequences, such as they may be: suffering among the poor and lower classes or even societal collapse. We are minor players in this, little people and losers in relation to Trump. 

If this interpretation sounds extreme or melodramatic consider some of the results of the policy fixations of Trump's predecessors, such as an economic convulsion due to deregulatory fervor and the unending violence and chaos in the Middle East.

Trump could do a lot of harm fairly quickly and never look back. His success in the election only reassures him of his superiority but everything in Trump's world is circular, self-justifying, fatalistic and meaningless. Everything only means what he says.

The Appointed One

The messianic aspect of Trump's campaign--the "Save America" talk--is continuing after his win and it's worrying. If Donald insists on the savior shtick it could mean a culmination of the trends and fantasies of Reagan and Bush: the ability to see the world as it isn't and the need to play hero.

Arcade on Fire

Americans are so absorbed in and consumed by the video games their lives have become they don't notice that the arcade is on fire. 

Trump and the Feudal Spirit

It's a curious inversion of things, especially in America, when an undeserving upper class is considered beneficent for returning to average citizens what was theirs in the first place, before it was stolen.

Trump! Oy Vey!

God bless the Jews. They always vote massively Democratic. 

Holy Mackerel

Some of my friends are surprised by what they see in me as the placid acceptance of Trump. Trump is a horror but I think that Republicans have been offering up horror for decades so Trump seems less like an exception to me. 

He's an outlier as a human but not as a Republican, I mean. So if I only say "holy mackerel" and not "shit-fuck son-of-a-bitch" it's not from a lack of indignation. It's from forty-plus years of habituation, desensitization and inurement.

This Is Us

The more I get used to the Trump debacle I realize that he is perfect for us. We are the biggest pigs in the history of the world. 

We Deserve This

Whatever Trump is we deserve him--the Republicans for nominating him and the Democrats for failing to beat him.

"Birther President"

Just putting this out there. It's such a startling concept.

The Brother of All Battles

I'm sure the Democrats will wuss it up in defeat, as always, and that we will have moans and a spike in the sale of self-help books instead of battle cries and blaring voices. Among the well-heeled on the left--who knows.

They were never that vulnerable after all. But the line of vulnerability is moving up and to the right. With Trump the bell is tolling for all of us. I think it would be good to encourage it on up and rightwards in any way possible.

Trump Against Cancer

Trump isn't an ideologue he's an idiot. He needs adulation and will want to be admired as a president and be well-remembered.

He may do okay. And if he destroys us it will probably be fast, like a heart attack, and not the horrible cancer of Cruz or Rubio.

Sarah in Botswana

I suggest we appoint Sarah Palin ambassadress to Botswana. I think there's big game there she can hunt. I love the idea of getting her out of the country. The Trump boys could visit and hunt with her. Maybe one of them would have an affair with her. She's probably past the age of reproduction but, my God, what a genetic makeup that kid would have had.

The lesson in the Trump family would have to be that any kind of sexual impropriety is just fine and likely to be rewarded. And Bill Kristol could be posted to Swaziland. There's an opportunity here to get some of these rich right-wingers out where they can do some good or whatever and off of their asses. And, again, out of the country and out of our hair. 

American Hysteria

White women voted for Donald Trump, as they did for George W. Bush in '04, and by about the same margin. Now, girls, will you please shut the fuck up. Get your own house in order.

Dream On

For less fortunate Americans who want to do better Republicans have always had an answer: dream on. If Trump is an outsider to this attitude--well, good. I'll believe it when I see it.

Big Flirt

In some ways I don't feel that bad about Trump. We've been flirting with this outcome for decades, playing brinkmanship with political insanity. Maybe it's better to get it out in the open. And maybe Democrats will get a clue.

Orientation

Can you imagine what Trump's presidential orientation will be like? It must be sobering for anyone, even an experienced elected official or civil servant, to be introduced to the responsibilities of the presidency. With the callow Trump it will be a heady initiation into a new world and into a range of duties and a circumscribed and curtailed scope action unfamiliar to him, not to say that he can't and won't do an amazing amount of damage.

Trump Isn't the Problem

The problem is the people who voted for Trump. He would be nowhere without them.

It's the Confederacy, Stupid!

To Paul Krugman and the other clueless commentators of his type I say: wake up! None of what you decry would have happened without Southern, evangelical Christians. This is the revenge of the rebels and the racists. 

Will the Democrats Finally Wake Up?

I don't think so. Their obliviousness is astounding.

I Won't Miss Hillary

I won't miss Hillary. On a lot of international issues I may agree more with Trump, such as interventionism.  But, domestically, Trump is a disaster and the impulses behind him are horrifying. Commentators are saying that Trump voters need to be heard and this is true. 

But they have voted for the people who screwed them. That is in a context which is a fantasy and a delusion propagated by wealthy, self-interested people and exemplified by Fox News. It's all a lie and the victors in the election are immersed in that world of lies.

Black Mass

Reports are coming in. Trump supporters are dancing around the fire at their black mass celebrating the end of America.

Reflexive Election

What has happened with Trump is reflexive. It not only redefines our present it redefines our past. We are not the people we thought we were. 

Soul Sacrifice

With a Trump presidency now assured soul-selling in America has reached critical mass. The only argument to be made to dull the blow is not about Trump--his personal attributes are apparent--but to rewrite our past and redefine ourselves, formally, as a country of losers, idiots and evil-doers. 

The Bush presidencies now seem to be something different, the voices crying from the sticks and weeds heralding the age of political hacks, to culminate in Trump, who is not Machiavellian but a pig and a crook of epic aspect. Reagan was a marketer of fantasy and Nixon the original soul sell-out.

Where did we go wrong and where do we draw that line? When was the beginning of our end? It's not so dramatic--but more dramatic than we thought. The failure was accomplished by the idea that the ends justified the means and that only one of our political parties was fit to rule. The rest followed.

The World Watches in Horror

For all of my adult life I have had no political representation--no say in how I am governed--because I disagree with the direction my country has taken. We should be leading the world on environmental issues and energy conservation. 

We should have guaranteed health care and a decent standard of living and secure retirement, fewer guns, smaller prisons and an advanced infrastructure. It's one thing not to get your way but another to be disenfranchised and marginalized. 

That's un-American. But what is American anymore? If Donald Trump is American then I am not. What do you say after "screw you"? That sentiment has won the day with Trump. For decades decent, tolerant citizens have had to suck it up. 

Their backward fellow citizens, now empowering Trump and empowered by him, have had to be humored in order for life to go on at all. And what do we get? The return on our investment in tolerance and civility is a catastrophe of incivility. 

The Age of Trump has come. The triumphalism and gloating will be a thing to remember. Nothing can redeem us now. We are lost.

Auto Fuck-Us

Assuming Hillary wins we then head into the well-known, current partisan political phase known as auto fuck-us. This is where the Republicans plan and then execute strategies to cripple any successful Democrat. It is unconstitutional and treasonous but they don't care.

Update, 11/9/16: Auto Fuck-Us is turned off.

Who's Deplorable Now

As horrible as Trump is one of the images that sticks most in my mind, from the background press on the election, is from a clip of Hillary rejoicing at the sight of Qaddafi's dead body. What kind of person does this? Who knows what any of us would have been like in a different life and situation.

The West is so implicated in the Middle East mess going so far back it's impossible to know who is responsible for anything. No one should ever rejoice at the death of anyone. We are all implicated in everything. Hillary may find out what it feels like to get kicked around some more, as is threatened.

The Republicans are involved in a vast, informal, right-wing conspiracy of common intent. They don't need to meet in secret and hatch plots. That shit us well-hatched and widely appreciated and available. Hillary is a favorite target already. The next body on the ground may be figuratively hers.

The Atwater Index

Lee Atwater may not have been the biggest turd ever to rise so high in politics but it's hard to imagine anyone with more, overall pernicious influence. I hereby propose the creation of the Atwater Index of Perniciousness, or AIP, a linear-scale measure of terrible effects, with Newts and Bushes and DeLays and Ryans prominent on the inaugural list. 

Actual destructive output relies on more than moral degradation. Opportunity, ambition and social and administrative skills also play a part and the availability of a pool of subservient evil-doers, like James O'Keefe, Tucker Eskew, Grover Norquist and other such unelected underlings. Who knows what Lee might have achieved had he not died so young. 

Atwater himself never ran for office or was elected but he was the pioneering formosan termite of American politics, head of a hoard of hidden munching machines in the walls and foundations of our democracy. Now, due to Lee and his like, we all live with this apparently ineradicable menace gnawing away at us as in an epic horror or disaster movie.

Alternative Narrative

Trump has shown that almost any narrative is better than none. Still, the Democrats offer nothing. It wouldn't be hard to construct a narrative that Republicans are responsible for everything wrong with America. It wouldn't be hard because it is the observable truth.

Bite the Little Dog

Republican macho-men like to bite the little dog. What does this tell you? Though, they have their hoards of supporting ankle-biters as well: expendable, aggressive, untrained and recklessly willing. The big dogs are risk-averse. And why not. They have a lot to lose. Widows and orphans, watch out. They are after you or, at least, your share of well-being.

Flanking the Basket

Hillary's "basket of deplorables" is a poor figure of speech. That's one problem. But, more importantly, Hillary has outflanked and run around them, which is bad politics and bad morality. Democrats stand for inclusion and not objectifying anyone. 

Somebody still has to govern. It isn't any easier when you insult people. Hillary should have reminded them, over and again, that Republican politicians cost them their jobs, bankrupted the government and caused the housing bubble and recession.

And, for the icing, Hillary should have pointed out that the right-wing nabobs got rich(er) while doing it, giving the deplorables something to think about while Paul Ryan and his crew screw them in new, imaginative ways. It's probably too late now. 

My Dear Democrats:

I love you but nobody will ever respect you if you continue to get kicked in the teeth without fighting back.

Sincerely,

A Friend

Batten the Hatches

As only Bette Davis can fittingly say, I think we're in for a bumpy ride.

Already Gone

I think we're in a heap of trouble even if Hillary wins. Republicans are wanting an apocalypse for various reasons--some want the game to end while they're on top, others the actual four horsemen--and they are as blindly determined as an average jihadi or suicide bomber.

The impulses of ISIS and al Qaeda are combined among them, those of the lower classes and the elites, but Trump has exposed the fault and it's clear that many of the elites will vote for a thug anyway. The religious, economic and totalitarian purists are still under one roof.

But the whole, damn house is shaking and that's not good, whatever some Democrats think, because the collapse or implosion could engulf us all. Yes, I think it's that bad and looming. Consider the Great Recession, a right-wing creation due to a fetish for deregulation. 

Yes, they can mess things up very badly and quickly. If they continue to tempt fate one of these days we won't get away with it. We won't fully recover, that is, and life will never be the same. It will be sad as hell and it is already. The best of what we were is already gone. 

The Freudian Melodrama of the Republican Party

It was inevitable that some segment of American society would embody its adolescence but not that it would end up concentrated in a political party. That concentration was an accidental occurrence, I think, due to the opposite of serendipity, whatever that is, though it makes sense that our growing-up would include confronting the original sins of racism, segregation and slavery.

So now we have an angry, adolescent Republican Party having gone juvenile delinquent and wanting to be reassured of the strength of its guardian institutions or see them destroyed. The Democrats won't step in and aren't up to the challenge out of cowardice or poor resolve or a lack of understanding. They are weak and indulgent parents. To be fair it's not their role and responsibility.

But the animus underlying the wedding of the old, white, privileged elite with the racial resentment faction has resonated with the displaced working class and the otherwise dispossessed. What a mess. Anyway, they are hell-raising in search of reassurance of the resiliency of our social institutions. They crave manly heroes of the greatest generation-type to reign them in and make it all okay.

That isn't happening so they are following cardboard heroes for something to do until the roof falls in, fake men's men and pathetic, hollow substitutes who parade their machismo around, though the latest one isn't from Texas, at any rate, and like any wantonly destructive teenager they won't wonder what they're doing until they're standing in front of a heap of rubble feeling stupid. 

Forever Wrecked

The Wrecking Crew, as described by Thomas Frank, has moved from sawzalls to explosives and renovation to demolition. There will only be the equivalents of tents and tipees left, if even that. 

Now "ashes to ashes" is the American ethos. It's simply destruction for the sake of destruction as embodied and typified by Trump, the thug hero. Things will never be the same again. 

I need a break.

I'm trying to plan for the electoral outcome, whatever it is, and the only thing that's clear to me is that the process has been traumatic. Trump has threatened not to honor the result, which I don't think he will do but it's more red meat for his barbarians. And the Republicans are openly plotting how to cripple our government for Hillary's entire presidency, assuming she will win. 

You see, this is what happens. 

I intended to write about an escape and a break and I'm instantly sucked into the Republican vortex of insanity. The truth is that I think they are evil but that evil is a normal, naturally-occurring and inevitable thing. Educated people understand this and are on their guard but Rambo movies won't get you there and the Rambo and NASCAR factions are powerful among the Republicans. 

I'll say it again, I need a break.

Fuck Me

There's a big bag of protest voters in the Trump camp saying "screw you" to the rest of us but they're only screwing themselves. This is a result of the excellence of the Republicans in marketing lies and the failure of the Democrats in calling them on it. 

That, and an incredibly stupid and gullible section of the electorate who refuse to accept the protocols and responsibilities of living in a free, rational, democratic society. The idiots will take us all down. They already have and I fear where it will end up. 

A Deliberate Drive

I just can't believe that so many Americans are going to make a deliberate drive to the polls to vote for the piece of garbage called Trump.

Donald, the Trailblazer of Doom

What if Donald Trump is both our past and our future? According to this theory humanity was more or less shot out of a cannon by God or an evolutionary accident and is now on the downward side of a parabolic cultural journey, having clawed itself out of the caves of primitive existence and now facing re-entry into the evolutionary abyss. 

Certainly Trump is an anachronism but it's naīve to think that his supporters aren't knowingly opting for his brand of barbarism. They must want a return to an aboriginal, animalistic condition. The thought is that civilization in general follows the same observable path of the rise and decline and fall of individual civilizations, making Trump a pioneer. 

Non-Representative Democracy

Nobody's favorite answer is "yes and no" but it's too often true and, well, what do you expect when considering a non-representative democracy, a seeming contradiction in terms reflecting a compromised, imperfect reality. Some of the compromise--the gap between pure democracy and what we have--is planned and inherent in the electoral aspect of it and, in that sense, a pure, direct democracy is not representative. 

But, damn, our democracy has headed headlong in the other direction, becoming bizarrely unrepresentative of anybody. We live in a nominally representative democracy but it isn't representative of our aggregated will--pure democracy with the edges rounded off--but representative of the edges, the fringe, the should-be-rounded-off part. That fringe doesn't even get what it wants, non-democracy, but an unintelligible mess. 

The system has collapsed only partially and landed in a distorted democracy, a ridiculous neverland that doesn't serve the longer term interests of anyone. So it's a "yes" to being representative in that it embodies our failure and confusion, that people are voting against their own interests, but "no" in that they have been deliberately duped and misled, wherein is the failure on our part, in detection, in seeing that we are fools.