Only the Good Die at All

Evangelicals have it figured out. You have a conversion experience with some charlatan who appears to have advanced degrees in hucksterism and bullshit and you are guaranteed salvation thereafter no matter how you behave. You might as well be wicked.

The fools who think good works get them into heaven are all going to hell. Wickedness, combined with worldly success, comprise a higher state since you know those folks haven't fallen for the heresy. God has obviously chosen them. They are among the elect. 

Earthly success is evidence of election. The heretical do-gooders, however--SJWs, as they are now contemptuously known--all die and are damned to hell. You get eternal life on top of a nice, sinful, easy ride. Self-righteousness becomes you. You get to have it all.

The City of God

In case you were wondering what the "city on a hill" envisioned by the Puritans looks like when realized at a national scale just look around you. The evangelical version is a city of lies. The evangelical version has killed over a million people in the Middle East. The evangelical version takes away the means of life from powerless and vulnerable people while further enriching the wealthiest and increases military spending whenever possible. The evangelical version closes borders to people fleeing societies destroyed by our manipulations and demand for drugs. 

The evangelical version of the city on a hill is a city of death. It extinguishes light and lives in the shadows of greed, violence and fear. They hunt the truth like prey and kill it. If there is a God in heaven they have condemned themselves by their actions. 

I will witness to that. 

He Stoops to Conquer

Our boy Donald plays every seedy card he can to enhance his primal power. No doubt, together with the carrier of the nuclear "football," someone follows him around to fumigate and decontaminate each space he has occupied as he vacates it.

The toxic atmosphere is reduced to the point of survivability but the poison still has an effect. They fall like flies, every hint and reminder of decency fleeing in moral panic. The shells of men are left standing like the discarded husks of morphing insects.

Bodies are enlisted as souls are compromised. Ghouls and zombies stalk the halls of a “white” house. Evil can never really be “incarnated” because the inherent innocence of creation resists its full incorporation, hence the “casting out” of demons.

Cast out the demon Donald. Remove him from your life, for the survival of your soul. Evil is always in the world, whatever its appearance of dormancy. When conditions are right it grows and spreads, fungus-like. Refuse this evil its preferred conditions of fear.

Refuse to be its host. Keep the faith. Your body might not survive the demon’s onslaught but the soul can. I know, it isn’t fair. Nobody did anything to deserve this but it is a reality—the reality of the soul-sucking purity and intensity of the evil of Donald Trump.

Terrifying Stuff

The latest trend in Republican lies and distortions is to accuse protestors and resisters against their reign of terror of aggressive and violent "mob" behavior, further objectifiying their invented enemies who have been baited and goaded into action. Objectification of this sort is an important step in justifying their own violent desires. 

How far will it go? Who knows, because it is already further along than we ever thought possible. It is uncharted ground. Death, after all--the killing of their political enemies--is only the ultimate in disenfranchisement. They are convincing themselves that any measures are fair in maintaining their power and crushing their opponents. 

Suspend Everything

Olivia Nuzzi's interesting White House encounter proves our worst suspicions true, that the highest levels of authority in the land are populated with people so degraded, self-centered and disgraced they don't deserve to be treated and understood as legitimate occupiers of their positions. Therefore, every day we go about our lives as though these baboons and goons are in any way normal and deserving officials and functionaries in a democracy we only solidify their hold on it. 

We become more implicated. 

They become more entrenched. No one should observe a holiday or participate in any national tradition not necessary to their livelihood as long as this goes on. Cancel Halloween, for example. Cancel every holiday except Christmas. I will let that one pass, though it should be a day of prayer for the salvation of our country and reflection on what we once were and where we went wrong. Everyone should sit during national anthems at ball games. No one should recite the Pledge of Allegiance.

Pledge allegiance to what? Our constitutional democracy and republic no longer exist. This is an emergency. Our crisis is upon us. We should have constant, daily reminders that this is not acceptable. We should be in mourning. Black armbands are appropriate if full funeral attire is not possible. Representatives who kowtow to Trump should be anathematized in every possible way, greeted with scorn and consternation in public. And we should always be immediately recognizable as resisters. 

We must take a stand.

Living in the CSA

Well, my Yankee friends, for decades I preached to you that there was something rotten in the land of cotton and now you demand explanations for the lie-fests hosted by Sarah Sanders. Remember when I told you that the Civil War never ended in the South? 

Remember when I told you that lying wasn't an activity there involving discrete occurrences and moral lapses that were later repented but a state of being necessary for psychological survival? "Compartmentalization" doesn't capture this because it is the defining trait of their psyches and it fails to produce an “integrated,” functioning result in a Freudian sense by ending an untenable schism and conflict or at least making it livable.

Rather, every defense mechanism has failed and unconscious drives are running the show, not merely "informing" daily life but compelling these organisms on to the murderous flameout demanded by the dark matter they have projected onto minorities and other false vessels for their fears--the fear of justice for their own inhuman corruption. 

Notice how incapable they are of acknowledging uncertainty over the matter of their own salvation. They MUST believe they are pure, chosen and on the side of God. 

It is an inversion in which the larger qualities of conscience and humanity are defeated and ruled by a demented, personal, rogue, Satanic government of lies seething with the seeds of its own destruction. The criminally insane have taken over the asylum. We have been hijacked by terrorists and defeated by a mob now looting our corpses. 

They have no plan. There is no future, goal or intelligible end-game. They are the damned, having forfeited their humanity to the need for certainty. 

The Confederates are addicted to untruth. It is a compulsion and an internalized civil war fated to end in explosive disintegration and self-annihilation. It is punitive, persecutory, beyond cynical and utterly degraded. Sarah and her southern compatriots are unaware of the drives that animate them. The apparent calm is a sign of their thralldom. 

Now, Trump may be the most incredible liar ever but it is a personal attribute. He isn't part of a social movement or an example of mass psychosis or hysteria. He's an outlier elected opportunistically by greedy people, idiots and religious fanatics. Sarah, by contrast, is an icon and cultural phenomenon, their Greek goddess and patroness of lies. And there will never be an accounting. There will never be justice. Not within that context.

I’m here to tell you that the Confederacy has won the Civil War. They never stopped fighting and now they have won, racism having been subsumed to class hatred and classism having routed democracy, equal protection, inalienable rights and the rule of law. Understand Sarah as speaking for the CSA. Understand Sarah as a clarion of the army of the apocalypse. 

Then it makes sense. And, remember, the apocalypse is something they desire and deem good. Onward, into the abyss!

America is Suffering

America is sick. America is suffering. Soon enough, America might be dead. The disease is Donald Trump. The disease is Republicanism. If Republicanism isn’t rooted out America will die. We might already be doomed.

Answerable Only to God, If Anyone

It seems that the White House and Sarah Sanders might be ending the whole institution of press briefings.

And why not?

Sarah has made it clear that she answers only to God with whom she has a personal relationship ensuring her salvation. So, why pretend to care what the American people, her employers, think?

How perfectly this fits with an executive branch that answers to no one.

Almost Gone!

Get a last shot at democracy while you can! Vote in the next election! Someday soon you will remember the experience and marvel at the naiveté of the poor fools, you included, who thought our democracy was unassailable and permanent.

Fail and Flail

Megyn Kelly is flailing and failing outside of the comforting confines and protecting womb of Fox News. Again we see the bullshit factory exposed as a fortress of lies and hypocrisy.

Republicans tout competition and a fantastical form of "freedom" from the outside. That is, they inhabit a separate realm of privilege and the absence of accountability. 

Raw Kavanaugh

Brett Kavanaugh has revealed himself to be a partisan hack and a technician of doom, not a legal sage, scholar or an open-minded individual. He has no business being on any court.

The Horror Show Continues

There will never be an end to Republican lies, their quest for power and insistence on ideological purity. I couldn't watch the Kavanaugh spectacle but he proved to be, as I suspected, a pure political hack.

He embodies lying and hypocrisy in a way perfected by Republicans. It guarantees the incapacity of conscience. They have found a way to turn conscience off. Or, many ways, it might be more accurate to say.

Rewards are administered for ideological alignment and punishments for waywardness. Weak, striving, self-serving vermin like Kavanaugh will never stray. He is a partisan, political person to his core and emptied of integrity.

Kavanaugh is aghast that he is accused of sexual assault but it was done in an entirely legal, forthright and appropriate way. He pursued Bill Clinton like an avenging troll in that irregular, rankly partisan investigation.

Later, of course, he discovered he had principles of respect for executive authority and immunity from judgement under George Bush whose crimes defy enumeration.

The Great Pout

I resist the implication that Trump is anything other than the fulfillment of everything it means to be a Republican. His presidency is the reigning achievement of Republicanism. Trump is George Bush, bailed out by family money and protected from real danger but having shed his effective army of babysitters, a loose cannon. He is an actor like Reagan living a narcissistic if less attractive fantasy.

Republicans, after controlling things for decades, still believe or at least pretend to believe that they are put-upon, maligned and disadvantaged.  We see in Trump the apotheosis of everything Republican—the aggrieved attitude, the aggression, the greed, the resentment, the delusional grandeur and attachment to melodrama and the sense of a mission to right the wrongs of being disrespected. 

What a mess of mistaken, retributive folly. Republicans need to believe that incompetence will never be exposed and uprooted and that justice will never be had. They deny any responsibility. They have never gotten over being uncool in college or some other form of delusional insecurity. Kavanaugh, no? Behold, the Great Pouter prepares to preside:

Get the attitude. Donald is in the lion's den. It is a den aspiring to decency and accountability, the things he most fears and resists. Fear not, Don-boy. Bush destroyed the world and walked away. I doubt you will ever get what you deserve, as a crook and a coward and a bully, to be stripped of everything and put in jail.

Entrepreneurship as the New Salvation

"Entrepreneurship" has entered the arena of fable. Americans can't seem to do anything without it becoming a matter of salvation and a justification for separating individuals into predestined groups of lesser and greater innate good. We were never created equal or endowed with anything other than an inescapable destiny which might be manifested in temporal, worldly success.

Freedom doesn't enter into it. We are everything but free because we believe everything to exist and occur by the perverse, incomprehensible and apparently arbitrary will of God. Arbitrary destinies and injustice are reassuring signs of the divine will at work. Successful entrepreneurs are manifesting their predetermined destiny as members of the chosen class of the "saved."

The Troll Army Has Some Trouble

Trolling. Bullying. Harassment. Abuse. All assume a power differential and the impossibility of retribution or justice, that the perpetrators are immune to their own tactics. Oh, but how they squirm and complain when it unavoidably happens, that upending of the order of the universe wherein they are arbitrarily and permanently on top and infinitely deserving. When they get a dose of their own awful medicine they whine like anything. 

Often, of course, their tactical advantage is in the willingness to go lower and play dirtier, sometimes in ways inconsistent with the continuing existence of the system that supports them and makes their mischief possible. Brett Kavanaugh resists justice and proclaims his purity and innocence--in reality, his sexual incompetence--which again makes his boorish and brutish behavior more understandable, believable and likely. Ah, adolescent boys. 

He is aghast at his mistreatment. His allies react with typically nasty, irrational, ill-considered counter-accusations. They are indignant at the resistance. 

View the privilege. It is pure privilege. Brett, the vicious little Puritan, gleefully took every cheapshot he could at Clinton, in an illegal and unjust persecution, the original and only modern American witch hunt and "high-tech" lynching at that level. Then he was PART OF and fully implicated in the horror and murderous reign of George Bush, which has left over a million dead and and untold lives destroyed. Stuff just happens, on their watch. 

Yes, there are grownups in the virtual room, hardened sociopaths, unlike the opportunists. Their perverted consciences choose power over principle. Those are not the trolls, street fighters, underlings, hacks and henchmen of the movement but its invisible hand and guiding spirit. Kavanaugh, currently a hack, seeks elevation in his status into a certified bunker of privilege. He is still an enforcer for the untouchable uber-rich hovering above the fray.

He isn't rich but he wants to hover. He wants that status. He was screened to ensure he was a true, degraded follower of the cause, and ideologue immune to the inroads of conscience--consistent, pure and unwavering in his corruption--a bad actor to begin with. After the mess he is going through now he will only be more vengeful and vindictive on the Court. Great. Just what we need, a warrior troll in place of a complacent, self-satisfied hack.

Deconstructing Reconstruction: The Nihilist Assault Group

If we ever needed salvation from nihilism, the time is now. I've heard it pointed out that some terrorists are nihilists, people without political goals, but I think that nihilism can reside within a rational frame of reference, as a tactic, and then rise up in an uncontrollable Freudian melodrama and begin to run the show. So it is with racism. Reconstruction ran this way. Deconstruction is a technical term used originally to apply to the analysis of texts.

It seems to have become loosely associated with leaving things in pieces when I think, in fact, it assumes the integrity of the whole in order to function as an analytical framework. But the leaving-in-pieces part appeals to nihilists in a broad, fuzzy, adolescent-boy, wouldn't-it-be-cool-to-blow-this-up-and-see-what-happens kind of way. This appears to be the underlying ethos and ethic of the Trump administration--institutional self-destruction. 

It is our society's suicide by Trump. Anyway, think of how, in your own lives, a rational tactic can play out poorly in a larger context. More money is good. You pursue more money and, presumably, more happiness follows. Aha, but there are other, un-independent variables on the same side of that equation. There's a bunch of them, factoring in the irretrievable time lost in the pursuit and how that focus affects you and what happens when the kids realize daddy is deadbeat and a money grubbing dick.

Turning now to Steve Bannon we see that in his mind, assuming he's not out of it, deconstruction appears to entail stripping down an entity--our entity, the federal government--to its most essential, limited level of function, leaving in in parts on the ground, which would then supposedly be reassembled by master, government-craftsmen from Breitbart and Heritage and similarly revered organizations, never mind that it would have been nice if he'd asked our permission, seeing how they didn't exactly get it in the last election and the thing being "deconstructed" is ours and us.

Never mind, never mind--because they know they are right with all the assurance that denial can get you. And deconstruction, it turns out, is a fancy, ambiguous term for dismantle. Why would Steve use such a word? I looked it up and it doesn't apply, in its usual sense, to something such as the government. But it sounds cool, abstruse, learned and abstract and most Americans don't want their government dismantled so its annihilation must be rebranded.

State of Nature (lite)

Frustrated by their inability to kill their fellow citizens by a direct assault on healthcare Republicans are now attempting the old tactic of defunding Medicaid to death, simultaneously bankrupting the government. Budgetary necessity will later be used as an excuse to try to destroy Social Secutity and Medicare.

Republicans want a dog-eat-dog, brutal, barbaric kind of society but only up to the point at which it affects them adversely, an arbitrary and biased choice, since the entire social contract is at risk. They are challenging not just the formal aspects of our social system, its laws and traditions, but civilization itself. 

Why should people acquiesce when deprived of the means of life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness let alone when those rights are explicitly granted to them? They should not but it is clear now why we have the anti-democratic push from the right--so that government "of, by and for the people" might perish from America.

Wonder no longer why they want to have hoards of guns and unlimited, extra-judicial control of domestic surveillance, foreign intelligence services and the military. They want to control everything. That power will be employed selfishly. That power will be employed against us, those among whom it was intended to reside.

Professional Racist

Consider that one of the most powerful people in America, and therefore the world, Stephen Miller, can only best be described as a professional racist. It is his defining characteristic and attribute, however it might appear on a résumé.

I Hope for Jesus

I don't believe in the second coming and I have a qualified belief in the first but I long for Jesus now, convinced that those most adamant about their association with HIM are working for the other guy. Sarah and "Beau" Sessions are my stand-ins for all the promulgators of lies and corruption.

Who knew there were so many of them? It was always thus, that human weakness creates a market for souls. It is so glutted and deflated the owners are giving them away. The great stories in the myths of the civilizations reference dark times of decay when evil ascends and confusion reigns.

But I never thought to live through it. I thought the myths had been pastured and replaced by articles of reason, a scientific method and institutional wisdom of another kind. Was I ever wrong. We are consumed by stories and, for our sins, the false ones, cooptions of reality, are winning.

A Report on the Wrecking Crew: Mission Accomplished

Thomas Frank wrote an observant and prescient book, The Wrecking Crew, about the barbarian horde within our walls, Republicans, determined not to streamline, pare-down and improve the federal government but to destroy it. It is still unclear to me what their real motivations were, apart from vandalism and adolescent, sociopathic recreation.

Greed, certainly, but it doesn’t matter anymore. Mission accomplished. Our government is on its knees, ready for beheading, and sabotaged beyond recovery. Good job, boys. Put away the sledgehammers, dynamite and other tools of ruin. Are there limits to your thirst for vengeance? I haven’t seen any sign of it, especially since the advent of Trumpism.

I thought the election of Obama was a rejection of the politics of national suicide and self-destruction but you barely broke stride. Now that we are under the control of ideologues and a miraculously incompetent and depraved piece of shit what do we do? Where is our promised utopia? Where are all the wonderful effects you swore would ensue?

It was always a lie: https://harpers.org/archive/2008/08/the-wrecking-crew/

Heroes of the Devolution

All that is wrong with America is attributable to Republicans. Since they insist on controlling everything how can they not be responsible? Such an overwhelming wave of corruption, incompetence and malfeasance is hard to keep organized in a person's head. 

I can't do it, so I am proposing a Rogues' Gallery History of the United States. That is, assigning credit for messes to the idiots and ideologues most responsible, starting with American agriculture, the destruction of which can be credited to Earl Butz. He decimated smaller and family farms as best he could. "Get big or get out" was his slogan. He was asked to keep food prices from rising in the face of the 1970's oil shock so that Nixon might get reelected, a typical rationale from hell.

Next there is Robert Bork, whose love of monopolies influenced Reagan to deregulate businesses and deprofessionalize the government. Remember, Republicans don't like businesses generally they like BIG businesses. Little guys can go fuck themselves. Think of Bork the next time Spectrum or AT&T makes you livid. Bork wrote a book extolling the benefits of monopolies. Both Butz and Bork were open about their aims. This is before the movement went clandestine and guerrilla.

Newt Gingrich and his soldiers from evangelical hell created our hopeless divisiveness with their contemptuous and contemptible self-righteousness. Republicans have always excelled at generating economic downturns and depressions. Their brand of predatory capitalism--welfare for the rich--produces booms and busts which result in horrific injustice. Phil and Wendy Gramm are behind the ideas Newt finally, permanently enforced, deregulating everything possible. It's an Enron economy.

For military industrial-complex malfeasance we cite Dick Cheney and Donald Rumsfeld. When Republicans talk of "synergies" consider this: they pour trillions of dollars into needless military hardware which money then comes back to them in part in campaign donations if not in more direct ways. They are corporatists of doom, peddlers of death, arrogant traitors and paranoid misfits. They prefer to put a match to the money of working Americans than see it used on social welfare.

Haley Barbour will represent the seedy society of lobbyists. He initially recreated the ways of Mississippi in Washington. Decisions are made by rich white men cutting deals in back rooms. This method of minority rule has taken over the whole country as state legislatures fall to well-monied, self-serving monopolists, power brokers and bigots. The revolving door is very active in this sphere though vested interests, collusion and corruption permeate everything everywhere now.

Stand back and look with wonder at the new America created by Republicans. It has nothing to do with anything but empowering the rich at the expense of everyone else. 

The Left's Big Lie

Democrats and the political left are overdue for some self-scrutiny and reform rather than the usual handwringing. The white women's party now marches on in continuing confusion while the Right explodes into pure fascism and compels the country downwards. How hard can it be to direct unified, coherent criticism against an entity, the Republican Party, that has left a trail of destruction for forty years culminating in Trump?

The good news is that a core belief of the the Left, on the evils of racism, has been proven right. The bad news is that white women, as a political movement, are racists, getting it into their heads that they were above judgement and existentially correct--not because of the integrity, humanity and decency of their opinions and policy prescriptions but because they were women. Why? They thought they were better than men.

They have proven that they aren't, most recently by voting for a depraved ignoramus and unrepentant ape for president. Perhaps that is good news too, in a way, that women really are the equal of men, even in arrogance, myopia and fecklessness. But while we are working out our shit on this the world as we have known it is coming to and end. Sorry to scorn the massive American consumption bash and exceptionalist ego-fest.

It is time for a change.

What If God Was One of Us?

Actually, God was. "GOD SO LOVED THE WORLD..." We are the ones who despise it, thinking it ours to destroy, the presumption, arrogance, apostasy and betrayal of evangelicals and the greedy, conservative elite.

God is always among us. The "second coming" isn't a temporal event. The end-times are always happening because our lives are always running out in the inevitability of death, and HOW we choose to live is therefore urgent. 

Choose well, my friends. The killers of Christ are active among us, having a field day, as they say. Love your neighbors, and don't trust those that don't. It's a simple command and worth following. Choose love.

Everybody's Talkin' At Me

The barrage of voices is so great it's impossible to filter or take in. I need a break. Give me a break. I can't hear a word they're saying because there's just too much of it. It's making me numb. Maybe that's the point. But it's my fault for listening. I'm turning it off now...

A True Parallel

Indignation and disgust are the only reasonable, possible reactions to the latest revelations of Catholic, clerical sexual misconduct coming out of Pennsylvania. In scope and severity this abuse of power is stunning and damning, no less so than with Trump and his cabal of crooks and cronies in Washington, where their positions of trust and power give them the chance to enrich themselves and screw others in defiance of the stated, implicit and implied duties of their jobs, thereby destroying lives. They should be in jail. Waterboarding should be used to determine their guilt. They believe in its efficacy, after all...

It's Not the Truth that Republicans Fear...

It is Justice.

Religious Freedom

Religious freedom. I’ve got it. You’ve got it. Who’s worried about it? Jeff Sessions is worried about it. He’s worried about it because his religion and the religion of likeminded southerners and others isn’t Christianity, it’s racism.

Yes, his religion is under attack. His religion is rightly vilified and fought against. His religion, in its public expression as discrimination and abuse, is illegal. Understand now that this has nothing to do with real religious freedom.

It’s about the freedom to be a bigot.

Cut Bannon's Balls Off

Steve Bannon's miserable presence has resurfaced, enlivened, as a defender of Trump after a whirlwind, pro-Nazi tour of Europe. I know that any Democratic presidential candidate will cut his balls off. They will strip him naked and march him down the street to be lashed and battered. Bannon will be pistol-whipped and pummeled. He will be kicked and spat upon. His eyes will be gouged out and his fingernails extracted. He will be hurled from a wall and dragged by a horse. He will be drawn, quartered and roasted on a spit. He will be drowned upside down. He will be knee-capped, IRA style, in honor of his Irish roots. His teeth will be pulled from his head and shoved down his throat. He will violated up the ass with prods and pokers. He will be vivisected and embalmed alive. We will drill holes in his skull and suck his brains out. He will be fed to sharks and snakes.

I'm only trying to get in the spirit of the next electoral cycle as fantasized by Bannon himself, master of sadistic tropes and similes, though maybe I’m being a bit more graphic. I mean it all metaphorically, of course. No harm intended, just like Steve...

Inscrutability Clause

Some people are so critical it's necessary to crack their psychology to try to understand them. There we see a perspective--there's no need to comment if there's nothing wrong, if nothing needs correcting. Similarly we now see, in Republican circles, that the truth is left to its own defense. 

Why bother asserting it? It's the lies that need defending. Republicans chivalrously show up to fight for the honor and virginal purity of untruths. Untruths aren't sullied by the stain of human reason. Untruths have a whiff of godliness about them, being inscrutable, abstracted and otherworldly. 

Take that, ye peddlers of the blasphemies of reason, thou arrogant apostates and defamers of revelations! 

The Renunciation

God calls everyone. There are those who don’t listen or for whom the call is drowned out and hard to hear. They are so involved in other things. They are so involved in themselves.

Then there are those who reject God and the very idea of God. This is always a form of idolatry. It’s impossible to exist in that vacuum so they try to fill it, often with themselves.

Originalist Sin

It appears that we are destined and doomed to another douchebag "originalist" on the Supreme Court. They fight the culture wars with the muskets and swords of Jesuitical indirection, rationalization and obfuscation, not that these weapons are ineffective. Anachronism puts an end to rational investigation.

They are claiming primal, biblical insight into the aboriginal meaning of our founding documents, so the temporal disconnect serves them well. With those documents held hostage, under lock and key, they only allow exceptions and concessions when they like, notably in armaments and the tools of empire and invasion.

An important subtext to the 2nd Amendment is that the founders were terrified of the prospect of large standing armies and stores of munitions. I demand therefore, in originalist spirit, that we return to actual muskets and knives, kept in the homes of average citizens and practiced upon varmints and Injuns, militia-style.

I will let them have billion dollar warplanes when we can have appropriate, available education and medical care. How have these not changed as much as warfare, influenced by technology and industrialization? Meanwhile, if we are stuck with him, at least Kavanaugh is supposed to be a courteous originalist prick.

An Emerging Understanding

The Cohen tapes make clear that Trump is capable of lucidity, planning and organized thought. It means that Trump is a con man. Con men belong in jail. Friends, we have our answer. Trump is a criminal and a crook. We must LOCK HIM UP.

Dog Eat Blog

Why do any of us bother? Look at the list of possible candidates to run against Trump. It is painful. This is a choice? Maybe Kirsten Gillibrand. We know now the entire Republican establishment is locked in the cockpit with Trump and they will fly us into a hillside before they do the decent thing and shoot him in the head (metaphorically, I mean...) and return a qualified person to the controls of our hijacked and ailing democracy.

Energy, determination and idealism abound in the ranks of the opposition but at the top it’s nothing but mind-numbing inertia and incompetence. Where is the fucking outrage? I’ll tell you, it’s so simple—every time you open your fucking mouths you talk about the lies. You assert that everything Republicans say is a lie. And... THEY caused the Great Recession. THEY bankrupted the government. THEY sent your jobs away forever.

THEY spent all our infrastructure funds on money-eating military fiascos in the Middle East WHILE cutting taxes on their cronies. All of this happens to be true. Yes, this is my report and writing assignment returned to you, dear Democratic leaders. I submit it humbly, and prayerfully ask you to GET OFF YOUR FUCKING ASSES AND DO SOMETHING. Thank you, they say, and turn away to their tea and scones. I return later for my response.

The dog ate my blog, they say.

Spicey's Lament

Sean Spicer's book absolves him of any responsibility for the crimes of Trump's calamitous rule. He was only doing his job. He was following orders. Donald was duly elected. It all happened so fast. They were heady times. Someone was holding a gun to his head.

Well, maybe not that last one but it all sounds very Third Reich. Sean, I recommend a trip to the Holocaust Museum in Washington. You are not absolved. You are responsible. Quit trying to save your own ass and think about somebody else for a change. 

The Existential Tourist

God doesn't give a shit about you. Your destiny was sealed at birth and you weren't one of the elect. The Bible tells you so, in so many words.

The Falwells tell you so. Franklin Graham tells you so. All the "prosperity gospel" preachers tell you so. God made your bed and you are stuck with it.

What to do, what to do... It's awful not being chosen. What are we doing here? Why did God make us, anyway, if we were only fated for shit?

These questions are unanswerable but you must have faith. You must have faith in your own shithood. The elect are entitled to life, eternally.

You are only an existential tourist, probably ballast for the lives of superior beings. Don't let it get you down. I have no other answer or advice.

This Vicarious Life

One manifestation of Puritanism is a reverence for celebrities. They, the chosen, realize their destinies and lesser beings look on in awe. Puritanical cultures are polarized. Fortunate people are existentially super-enfranchised and their lives are validated and enhanced by their successes. Their lives burgeon and swell with a surfeit of every good thing. It is enabled by the assumption of their limitless deservedness.

The thing builds on itself. They are somehow more human. Conversely, little people accept a reduced status as their due and participate in their own belittling. Their lives shrink in significance, They are coopted into intensifying the polarization and validating their own inconsequence by fatalistic and sick beliefs, becoming so separated from the “haves” they don’t even feel envy. They invest in the lives of the chosen as spectators.

It is a carnival and calamity of inhumanity, corruption and existential folly--degrading to everyone involved. The egos of the elect achieve magnificent, delusional proportions. Poor and working people see their lives shivel and diminish in their own estimation and presumably in God’s. They receive routine intimations of their end in ashes, dust and decay as others see their godliness materialized in earthly rewards.

Like a Rolling Stone

Many tactics comprise the compromising onslaught of corruption bedeviling our beloved country. But the sum of these tactics is a tactic in itself, if not a strategy--to overwhelm the opposition with the sheer scope and intensity of the treachery.

Always, those trying to protect the institutions and traditions of democracy are back on their heels. And, for the perpetrators, no stain of accusation sticks as they roll along like a stone, one outrage after another, now on a downhill path of momentum.

There must be a valley there somewhere. There isn't a point or goal to the destruction. It's now its own end and an addiction--compulsive vandalism. We watch, helplessly hoping--hoping it will end and that something will be left when it does.

One Appropriate Remedy

There's only one appropriate remedy after the double-whammy of the release of a new batch of indictments from Robert Mueller and Trump's amazing display of selective, self-serving credulity in Europe--he doubts, challenges and insults our allies, presumably decent people in positions of accountability, and kowtows to a mafia boss and enforcer with an indeterminate mandate. 

That they have in common.

Anyway, the 2016 presidential election should be nullified. I won't call Trump a traitor. I wouldn't even accuse him of an act of betrayal. There's nothing for an accusation to stick to. Trump is an ethical non-entity. He's "non-compos" and out-to-lunch. Let’s give him a permanent lunch break. He deserves it. But the tide of insanity that elected him is going nowhere. We need to deal with that.

Fundamentalist, evangelical Christians are behind it. They reject reason going back to the Enlightenment. They are afraid of its implications for salvation and the worship of God, so their posture in relation to God is degradation and their motivating impulse is fear. America is an Enlightenment country. They reject that. The "treason" runs that deep. It's a massive movement of unreason. 

Synchronized Sinning

You wonder how they do it--the soul-crushing lies of the southern white children: Sarah Sanders, Mitch McConnell, Jeff Sessions and all the rest. The lies flow out of them. Would that evangelicals went to confession!

"Father, I lied my ass off." Next week: "Father, I lied my ass off." Would you find a new priest every week to keep alive the presumption of contrition? Or justify it as white lying or in the service of a greater good?

I don't know. Somehow all the lies, justifications and rationalizations sync up and I don't think it's a conspiracy. There's a river that runs deep in these people—of repressed hatred and fear. It must be rooted in an injury.

Ah, the Civil War and desegregation. The rape of the South. They was done wrong. Clearly, they have no conscious access to the hate. Not most of them. They go to church. Their identities are entirely based on Jesus.

They identify with Jesus. They have had a faith experience and know they are saved and destined for heaven. They are certain they are good people. What do you say to that? I wish they would just stop lying. 

Plead diminished capacity for them but there are still all the lies. I know, they can't help it. It's strange that they insist on personal salvation. They behave like ants or some other kind of insect--like they are programmed.

A Self-Righteous Little Prig

I'm putting this out there, hoping someone with the opportunity and some kind of voice will call Brett Kavanaugh a "self-righteous little prig" as he is considered for confirmation. 

On the Road Again

We've seen it all before--the Trumpian road trip--but it's still startling when the insanity kicks in. Was there ever a man more self-centered and incompetent? Watch as the insults fly. They are the point. There is no end-game, unless you mean the evangelicals' national death wish. Aggression is the point. Donald is entertaining himself, as always, instinctively dominating everything and succeeding because he will play dirtier and go lower. 

Six feet under would suit him.

Trump Shamu

A quick look at Brett Kavanaugh's record and it's obvious why Trump chose him. Trump is covering his criminal ass and he identifies with Shamu and killer whales generally. In fact, it's amazing that such a perfect fit would exist.

Brett helped steal an election and defended the rights of corporations (read, "predators") to the exclusion of citizens. Corporations have rights. Individuals, not so much. He sided with Sea World against culpability for an eaten attendant.

What could be more symbolic and Trumpian? We are fodder and detritus. Working people are no longer needed in Trump-world, that burden having been shifted abroad. Opioids destroy us. Life-expectancy declines as profits soar.

Kavanaugh persecuted the Clintons over nothing and then argued for immunity as Bush wrecked the world. He has asserted that a president, while president, should be impervious to prosecution. Well, what did you expect?

It's time for our boy Trump to be beached. Kavanaugh will resist that in every possible way.

Take That, Motherfucker

I was really rooting for black people back in the day. I still root for black people. They have been treated unconscionably, down to now. Thus, it was a blow to my early hopes for racial progress when the black guys began using "motherfucker" every other word. I supposed their PR person was away that day. But now I understand the amazing wisdom and perception of the black guys.

They know lies when they see them. They know innuendo and cant. The mealy-mouthed bullshit masquerading among white people as wisdom and concern doesn't fool them. They see the structural inequity and oppression. And they saw, before it was obvious to us all, that America is the land of motherfuckers -- the realm, kingdom, plantation and domain of assholes and injustice.

The Metaphysics of Me-ism

I hesitate to call Donald an egotist because it sounds abstracted and analytical. This is a man who, if he were placed on a scale balanced against the rest of creation it would, in his estimation, tip in his favor. It would continue to tip in his favor as the exercise expanded into interstellar space, galaxies, the cosmos and parallel dimensions.

"Egotism" doesn't capture that, seeming to me to assume a normal social context of competing egos and assorted ids and other, unintegrated bits. Donald's subsumes, encompasses and negates all other "existences" thereby swallowing them up as an unimaginable orifice of life-negation, a kind of digestive tract of doom. 

Now, then. What is the metaphysics of that? Even evil has a context. This is something claiming status as the context, a godhead, an entity that thinks it is "meta" everything and is therefore “meta” nothing and without higher content, a bodily being postured not only as transcendent but all-encompassing. Trump is therefore self-negating.

He is so powerfully so he also negates everything around him, like a force field of ruin. His evident and somewhat encompassing corporeality negates his assumptions of superiority. This is the metaphysics of Trump, characteristically resting on an inversion and constituting an anti-metaphysics and regression into nothingness.

Yes, Chinese...

Yes, Chinese, it is really happening. You are being hit with the full force of the brilliance of the deal-making and negotiating skills of Donald Trump. I know, it is hard to take in and comprehend. You were accustomed to working with the neolib's and the Wall Street types who would sell their mothers for short-term profits. You could understand that. It was sick but at least intelligible. Though, I have observed that you respect your mothers more than we do. It is obvious from the Chinese people living among us in America.

The neolib's would sell out their country and fellow citizens in a heartbeat but, what the hell, if Americans were stupid enough to elect them that was their problem, right? Sure, you knew you were getting away with some shit and would have given ground but Herr Donald isn't acting within those parameters. He only wants to feel like a big man. 

That is the point, the incredible feeling of the POWER of not caring if the whole world economy implodes because of you and millions of people die, the freedom of the riotous abandon of not giving a shit about anything at all. This is the face of the American social-conservatives, an ill-wind from the south. They are "premillennialists"  and believe the destruction of the world will be followed by a reign of Jesus, for 1000 years. It is crazy as fuck. You can see why they love Trump. He has "end-times" written all over him.

Anyway, we are in the same boat. Rational, caring Americans are in awe of Donald's fecklessness and depravity. Let us join together to depose Trump and create a better world. Word is, our elections are pretty easy to hack. As an American I might be held responsible but y'all can go ahead full-steam and try to influence the midterms and beyond.

May God be with you. We are pretty helpless over here. The other side is too well-funded, driven, and now as reckless as Trump. They are batshit crazy. Sorry, do you know the idiom? Look it up but don't get too fixated on the terminology. What I mean to say is, on behalf of myself and my fellow citizens, HELP! And, welcome to the guano-sphere.

No Safe Space

Beginning when I was about twelve we began to have family problems. Up until then I thought we were very lucky but it went bad quickly. It involved my sister's flaming descent into incurable instability. Her eventual death was indirectly self-induced.

Then my mother got sick and died. Meanwhile, all of the other structures I thought unshakable and permanent began to weaken and decline. My father was too stunned and overwhelmed to counteract the chaos. It wasn't that bad, by some standards.

But it was to me because I hadn't been "hardened off" when I was younger. I didn't have the boundaries and defenses. I look back now on my vision of myself from the inside and compare it to my actual behaviors and to how I must have appeared. 

I was a mess. Shame sets in. I had no "safe place" to enable me to recover. My childhood home had become a place of unrest and pain and there was nowhere else. People need safe spaces--especially children but even as adults. We have none now. 

Trump has seen to that. Anyone who thinks they are safe is uninformed. And people who don't feel secure act out. They lash out and misbehave. It's not admirable but it's understandable. Shame sets in. Denial sets in. If it's bad enough it can't be faced. 

The people have to die, symbolically or actually. That is where we are heading--some kind of death and then possibly a rebirth. Symbolic death and rebirth is easier and a more likely outcome but it doesn't rule out a lot of actual death among the innocent. 

Our entire society might implode or end up in the ditch, collateral to the crash-out of the addicts. It is all from within. We have no rational threats. We are our own enemies. Primitive shit kicks in when people feel unsafe and Trump pushes every button imaginable.

It's the only real talent he has. He is a born a bully and a troll, with one reaction to every challenge, to smash and humiliate anyone who resists him. THIS man is supposed to be responsible for the “rule of law” in our culture. It isn't just a travesty. It's a horror. 

Pray for the ditch. Pray for a symbolic death and a possibility of recovery. It's the best we can hope for now.

The Inhumanists

"Sadism" sounds so weird. Who would do that? They don't know, of course, that they are doing it or they think it is justified. It involves compartmentalization, projection, a delusionally defensive outlook or some other misanthropic personality malfunction. It's as easy to recognize as it is incomprehensible. 

It is all around us now, more openly than ever. It feeds on itself. Trump, the seething opportunist, doesn't even "present" in this way. I don't think he means to hurt anybody, he is that disconnected. For the real thing look at Jeff Sessions. Look at Mitch McConnell. Look at Paul Ryan. There will always be individual sadists. 

A society can absorb that. What a society can't absorb is an identity movement of sadists, a tribe of persecutory sociopaths. And we have that now. It is the old Confederacy. The Reb's were unable to get over the insult of finally having the Yankees try to end their regime of violence, hatred and oppression. 

We are living in the Confederacy now. Everything is about property and privilege. They vote as a bloc. It has enabled them to take over. Our system is based on assumptions about individual behavior which are based on assumptions about individual human nature. Those assumptions are now false.

The tribalists have won. The country is no longer ours. It's a sick entity reflecting a sick minority. The innocent will suffer more than anyone. It's always that way. The delusions create stronger drives than any sense of reality. Hate and division is stronger than togetherness and love, in the short run. 

We might be in very big trouble. The inhumanists feel small. They feel vulnerable. They feel slighted and insulted. In their twisted minds the anger and aggression are justified. They actually enjoy seeing other people suffer, as hard as that is to understand. It makes them feel more stable and secure. 

This is very sick shit. And we are awash in it.

Colored People and Catholics

If a hurricane comes your way pray you are not living in a place with a lot of colored people and Catholics, like Puerto Rico or New Orleans. You will be screwed. Better to be in Texas. Texans figured out how to suck off the government decades ago and never let up. And it sure doesn't hurt that there are a lot of pretty white Protestants there.

Logos vs. Chaos

We are witnessing much more than a partisan political struggle for short-term ends or even a battle for the soul of a nation. It is Star Wars, good against evil, and we are too conditioned to diminish our daily experiences in relation to mythical clashes to see the significance of it. Sure, it is an assault on decency and moderation.

Yes, it is the rejection of compromise and conciliation. Truly, it is an assertion of the "will to power" over inalienable rights. But it is more than all of these. It is another attempt to plunge humanity back into the abyss of meaninglessness. It is chaos overtaking intelligibility, the inversion of everything civilization stands for.

Scumbag Millionaires

I have never begrudged anybody anything. But now those with the most want to deprive everyone else of everything they can, even to the point of throwing away money on fruitless wars and burning though it in other ways to keep it out of the hands of their inferiors.

Watch how sociopaths and scum flock to the Republican Party, drawn to its cruelty by a lust for power and opportunities to bask in a culture of trolls and bullies. There must be a similar thing happening among the money people, as opposed to the social conservatives. 

The implication is that many of the wealthy supporters of the Republican web of lies are wealthy not because they are good but because there are not. They were willing to go lower--to do anything and abandon every shred of personal integrity to make money. 

These crooks and scumbags are the ones on the offensive, I believe. There are many good people with plenty of money. They are not the ones voting for Trump and supporting socially destructive, malicious measures of every kind, like more tax cuts for themselves.