Death-cab for Cupid

Characteristically the Republicans are accusing the Democrats of doing what they themselves are doing which, in this case, is taking a wrecking ball to Christmas. 

The war on Christmas is a Republican thing. I appeal to Frank Capra, who truly knew what America is about. Sorry, was about. I appeal to the ethos represented in IT'S A WONDERFUL LIFE. Who can watch this movie and doubt that the Republicans are all Potterites? 

Hell, Mr. Potter wouldn't dare dream of what the Republicans have pulled off. Mr P. hadn't the vision of Phil Gramm, the destructive drive of Tom DeLay, the creative accounting skills of Paul Ryan, the administrative savvy of John Boehner, the frat-boy arrogance and callousness of the College Republican crowd, or the self-righteous certainty of the whole religious right. And he was in a wheelchair.

Our boys think big. They've turned the entire country into a playground for bankers, financiers, and other crooks. Hell, the whole world is funding their fun, now that they've shipped our jobs to any place with cheap labor. Thank you, assholes. Within their gated communities they're insulated from the plight of the commoners, the working--oops, unemployed--masses.

And there's a great getaway, Hedge Fund, NV, where they gamble with our money. If they win they keep the loot but we pay out if they lose. The profits are piling up while there's a corresponding boom in homelessness, hunger and every brand of misery.

But, hark, a blare of trumpets. An angel of the Lord appears, Walter, with a new video for all to see, THE SHIT HOLE. In it the Republican's poster boy president, some moron from Texas who goes by W, short for Wanker, is injured by an errant ball on the golf course. Conked on the noggin. A dream ensues. A fantasy.

We see, Wanker sees, in vivid detail, how much better life would be if he had never existed. Lives saved. Injuries unsustained. Economies flourishing. Food for all. Industries reborn. Infrastructures rebuilt. NPR and PBS funded to the gills. Support for the arts. Education for everyone. Health care for everyone. A paradise, by comparison. A really humane place.

Wanker doesn't like it, the world he sees there. A world of pussies. He's expecting the other boot to fall. Cowboy boot. Attached to a man. Attached to a hat. Ten gallon minimum. Not that he ever fought for anything. Earned anything on his own merits.

There's an assumption of violence in Wanker's world. Meanness. A struggle for power. Winners and losers. And Wanker is a winner. Born that way. Never had to work for shit. Got bailed when he failed. What's not to like. He don't want no competition. Likes the deck stacked the way it is. He's a pure product of privilege, a wizard of the high art of incompetence.

Wanker liked things the way they were. But he doesn't live in the shit hole, the real world he helped create. He is devoid of compassion. Of the capacity even. Of sympathy. Of caring. He is a void. A vacuum. Entropy man. The principle of disintegration embodied. Of destruction. A black hole of a human.

I mean, maybe not. He's a Christian. A follower of Christ. So he knows that any effort to turn back the clock, to Eden or Camelot or whatever, before the Fall from Grace, is blasphemy. The work of the humanists, the blasphemers, those in league with Satan. God wants the shit hole. So, who knows, maybe Wanker is doing God's work. He thinks so. His handlers tell him so.

So then Walter, playing himself in the video, taps Wanker on the knot on his noggin and, shazaam, Wanker is reborn as one of the unwashed. He's in the shit hole. He is amused, then stunned. He feels for the noggin knot. It's gone. This is reality, not a dream. It's all mixed up. He's cleaning toilets for the plutocrats. On a good day. Lots of bathroom time. Walking by a mirror, he sees himself. Shit, man, he's a nigger. This is worse than Kafka. Other days he's unemployed.

He blows a raspberry. No use. Heard somewhere that might work. Credit on his puny soul's all used up. There wasn't much to start. He sees a faint image of a laughing man with little horns disappearing into the distance. Looked like Peter Cook, kind of. The proprietor of the used car lot of souls. Poor Wanker. He was a junker.

Wanker's life sucks. But you know, to his credit, I guess, he accepts his lot and gets on with it. His belief in the Republican view of life, of the inevitability of injustice, of the certainty of suffering and its role in salvation, of the transcendence of the class struggle and the rise of the supermen and sinking of the scum, all this is unshaken.

It's tautological. If his life is shit it deserves to be shit. It was predestined. It's deterministic and fatalistic, this view. Positivistic, not normative. There are no standards. Justice is just what happens, so it's no different from injustice. There's no freedom, so no morality. Whatever.

It's a self-fulfilling world view. Self-justifying. Like the Big Dude himself. We see here with incontrovertible logic, if I can get a handle on it, that Republicanism is nothing more than a form of mass mental illness. 

If they would say that they hate children, for example, and want them to starve, well, then there would be some consistency, some cohesion to their thinking. Some honesty. Some integrity. They won't do that.

Then there would be accountability. Last thing they want. You deny what you've done to the point of denying it while you're doing it. Ballsy, if nothing else. And completely insane.

They take food away from children while calling themselves Christians and patriots and moral and ethical people. They are none of the above. It's conceivable to me that their world view is valid. I don't think so but who the fuck knows. What's it's not is American or Christian. It's un-American and un-Christian.

Back to Wanker. So Clarence, I mean Walter, realizes he's dealing with an intellectual non-entity and tells him the way out, back to the land of grilled steaks and the back nine. Blow a raspberry. Wanker blows. Damn if it doesn't work this time. For a frightening instant he appears dressed as a nun. But, then, the bermuda shorts. The knit shirt. The putter. Back where he belongs.

Boehner Babies

I'm announcing the creation of a new line of toys, BOEHNER BABIES, political satire dolls, which also function as hand puppets. The first is the man himself, OINKER JOHN, depicting the Right Honorable as a Pot Belly. 

Accessories include a tanning bed, a pink and green plaid golf outfit and whiskey glasses with "FUCK THE POOR, AND FUCK YOU TOO" written into the bottom. There's a whole set of golf clubs, made by Beretta, and a golf cart made by Hummer with an Ayn Rand hood ornament and "KOCHONUTS" emblazoned on the back.

The golf clubs double as assault weapons which fire out the shaft. There's NEWT THE NEWT, a used car sales doll selling only cars known to have failed and presumed to fail again. Accessories are a bunch of different cars, including the Chevron IMPALER, the Christer IMPERIUM and Ford FUCKUS. There are many more. 

There's a reproduction of the car lot itself on a board in miniature: "SUPPLY SIDE AUTO SALES, a division of RISING TIDE ENTERPRISES." Their motto: "IT'S ALL YOUR FAULT." Also: "NO TREAD ON ME." If they're closed there will be a sign on the door: "Out squandering other people's hard-earned money." The salesmen are taught that anyone who buys a car there gets what they deserve.

And MITCH THE BITCH, a doll in drag with glasses. There are attributes of a frog. Mitch is into submission. At an existential level. The MITCH doll comes posed bent over on its knees with its skirt hiked and ass in the air. Corporate Contributors love this one and have it in their offices.

Reminding them that Mitch will always do what they want. To cover the enticing parts for everyday use, since the doll is a bit NSFW, you can attach little placards to the doll's ass, with ready-made sayings. Like: TAX THIS, ASSHOLE. I DARE YOU; TAX THIS ASSHOLE. I DARE YOU.

The Michele Bachmann doll is called MY LITTLE CHICKADEE and is styled on Mae West. And a chicken. She looks great with that tuft of feathers on her ass. Really sets it off. Her cohort, the Mike Huckabee doll, is styled on W. C. Fields and is named HUCKSTER. 

Huck for short. His totem animal is the turtle. Huck is a card sharp and preacher. Chickie is an entertainer. Really she's just entertaining. They hang out at Oinker John's tavern, THE FEDERAL GOVERNMENT, where all the drinks are free. You get paid to drink, in fact, pro rata.

Huck and Chickie are at the bar all the time.They make their living there one way or another. And the living is easy, the economics of the place being based on the plantation model. 

There's a yearly festival, called HUCKABALOO, which is all garage bands and go-go dancing, in celebration of another year's successful existence at the expense of others. The dancers are called THE KOCHETTES and they excel at the WATUSI. 

An economy should work like poker, kind of. Mostly skill and determination with an irreducible element of chance. On average you'll do as well as you should. But not at the tables in Boehner's bar. Not the way they play it. Huck believes in predestination. He is predestined to win and you to lose.

So it doesn't matter how this is accomplished. It is God's will. So it's no problem if you cheat or lie or steal. Or kill someone, if it comes to that, in the furtherance of His will. As discerned by you. Meaning Huck. Or Rush or someone from HATE RADIO, their reliable source on matters divine. You have a prequalification letter for heaven, see. 

Too cool. The prequal came from Jesus or Jerry (Falwell) or Jimmy (Swaggert) or maybe that other Jerry (Springer). No matter. All reliable sources. Once you have accepted Jesus into your heart you are transformed. Into the best fucking card player on the planet, in Huck's case, since he can cheat with impunity.

It would be hard to come up with something better if you just made shit up, and it comes from God. A plunderer's dream-come-true, this ethos. So Huck always wins. Now TFG is the only bar in town. The only Republican bar, I mean. It's a virtual seat of government. Autonomous as hell.

Republicans, between you and me, actually despise competition. It's just too much trouble. Why go through the headache when you've got the prequal and all. And money. Fucking pots of it. So you love privilege. The leg-up. The easy-in. The legacy. The monopoly.

Now the Democrat (sic) bars are a shambles. You have to pay to drink, my God. And the stuff's taxed. That's the kind of crap competition gives you. Fair play. Rules. Accountability. Uncertain outcomes. And other inhibitions to the unbridled accumulation of capital. Screw that.

At Oinker's there are dart boards with really phallic-looking darts. Some of them have balls, even. Hell, they're dildos. Pointy dildos. You can imagine what the boards look like. Not always what you would think, though, since PUNKY SKUNK, Ricky Santorum, is in charge. He has quite the imagination on sexual matters. The darts look great but are horrible as projectiles. 

In the basement there's a rifle range with live targets brought over from Guantanamo. The shooters are not allowed to fire at the face, out of compassion. Many of the members are bad shots, though--so few have been in the military--so, well, stuff happens. It doesn't help that they're usually high on something. JOLLY OLLIE "OTTER" NORTH presides.

There's a venue for the dog fights, also downstairs. Lindsey "CRACKER" Graham runs it. He looks and behaves more or less like DONALD DUCK. Throws great tantrums when things don't go his way. Dog fights are an honored tradition where Cracker comes from. And the official sport of the tavern. 

Though they have plans for a race track down the road, with demolition derbies using Newt's cars. Newt will then resell them as "distressed," for more money because of the provenance. It is expected that working class Republicans will grab them up because of the cachet, using them as yard art if they're no longer driveable.

There's drug dealing and prostitution upstairs, both technically illegal, but the demand is high. That prequal is just so handy. No need to worry if you sin your head off. Lobbyists rent rooms for extended periods, and are at home there to the extent that they can't be distinguished from the drug dealers and sex workers. 

Some of the rooms are named in honor of notables. The POW-WOW ROOM for Jack "WOLFBOY" Abramoff, for example, in recognition of his outstanding work screwing Native Americans. The rooms can be rented on any terms, by the minute or indefinitely.

Huck checks everyone at the door. Members, the insiders, Republicans, in other words, have membership cards with religious imagery. Huck questions even the regulars on their required conversion experience to make sure they are true to the Lord. It's unclear whether this refers to a church experience or some kind of pledge they take at GROVER'S PLACE, another Republican hangout, a kind of frat house. 

Their hands are stamped "SAVED" and Huck says "Welcome to the New Jerusalem" as each member enters, a little ritual they all love. Many nights Oinker John himself is behind the bar, gavel at the ready. Occasionally Oinker crashes it down on someone's hand, smashing a joint or two, just for fun. 

The drinks have great names...

The house band, ANIMOSITY, is fronted by Ann Coulter. She's unbelievably terrible. She tries to channel Janis Joplin. It just doesn't work but nobody is willing to tell her. Her bandmates have industrial ear plugs. They wear matching brown shirts, a kind of uniform. James O'Keefe is on drums. Not that he has rhythm. My God, the screeching: "Down on me, oh, down on me..."

PALEFACES also plays there regularly, as does THE K STREET CONCUBINES... THE WRECKING CREW... DUE PROCESS... DUCK AND COVER... DICK'S DYNASTY... THE INBREDS... 

The whole music scene at the bar owes a huge debt to Lee "POSTAL BLOWFISH" Atwater, who pioneered the thing, to say nothing of his efforts to destroy the U.S. political system. His techniques there are still state-of-the-art. What a loss, when he passed.

Late at night, when everyone's all sodden and sentimental-feeling, they sing the classic: "HE AIN'T HEAVY, HE'S MY BROKER." The tears flow. Oinker himself leads the singing, weeping profusely. They also love to groove out on "GRAZING IN THE GRASS," a la THE FRIENDS OF DISTINCTION.

I think it's because so many Republicans are born kind of out-to-pasture, that they love this song. They get fat grazing that Halliburton grass, or whatever, and then declare themselves to be hard-working, self-made types, models of independence and productivity. 

Meanwhile they fence hell out of the pasture. It's not a matter of opportunity for them but of appetite. How much can you eat. How hungry are you. And they're very sensitive about all that privilege. Very protective. Understandably.

There's a game called WHACK-A-DOLE in an area of the bar reserved for reviling Republicans who have lost elections. In keeping with doctrine they are assumed to be out of favor with God, or Grover or somebody, for having lost. They used the real Bob Dole before he died. 

And a life-size Sarah Palin machine doll-like contraption. You put money in somewhere and crank her arm and she says the most inane, amusing things. She makes non-sequiters look like profundities and sequiters and shit. She's dressed in a skimpy outfit. You want to reach out and.... Holy Mother of Jesus, it really IS Sarah Palin.

OINKER JOHN has passed a bill having the whole place declared a sovereign entity, the block they own, so there's no end to the interesting stuff going on. Like Vatican City. There's sub-basement after sub-basement, increasing in secrecy and security as you move downwards. 

There's a museum with artefacts of all the great victories and other cool stuff. I mean, they have Grover's actual bath-tub. There are ceremonies there whenever someone is honored for adding hugely to the budget deficit. Red liquid is poured into the tub. There's a rickety toy boat, called THE SHIP OF STATE, bobbing in the red liquid. They seem terrified by it and scream insults.

Hard to understand. It's the boat we all came in on. Ensured all the opportunities and such. What's left of them. Some poor guy, an aged, soon-to-retire moderate Republican, starting screaming something about OEDIPUS upon entering the area. He was shot on the spot. He died mumbling about authority issues and wanting to destroy the fathers. No, sorry, Founding Fathers. That was it.

Another congressman jumped into the tub in an excess of enthusiasm as he was honored for a trifecta. That's a simultaneous lowering of taxes on the rich, raising of spending on defense and reduction in social welfare benefits. The fool, screaming his head off, was consumed by the liquid which is of course corrosive as hell. 

The HALL OF FAME honors those who have given to the cause to the greatest degree...

There's a place where the BB's themselves are birthed. WHORELY TIT hangs out there, the birther queen, to keep up her skills in determining authenticity on that whole front. Makes sure the BABIES are natural-born. Wait, oh my God, Oinker made it, the bar and its complex, an autonomous state. They're not citizens, the BOEHNER BABIES. But WHORELY declares them natural-born anyway. 

Baptizes them Americans. It's so great being able to just make stuff up. Also she's a dentist. Birther dentist. She helps out in the torture, ahem, "enhanced interrogation," room next to the firing range, where they take a last crack at those Muslims before they become targets. 

In another room there's a Tea Party which never ends, hosted by Ted TEDDY BEAR Cruz. His side-kick is BUZZ THE BUZZARD, Rand Paul. BUZZ lives for the day when TEDDY becomes road-kill. They're all in top hats. Or bowlers. Not exactly Fred Astaire, for sure. Incongruous. Not on BUZZ, actually. He looks good in his. Kind of dapper. 

For a vulture. TEDDY is clueless about everything but he's all preachy and vigorous in his opinions, and extremely intolerant of disagreement. He does indignation very well. That's his strength. Behind his back they all call him Oddjob. It's said he fantasizes about decapitating someone with his hat. Practices with it.

Makes you wonder maybe who's Goldfinger in the Republican scheme. They do seem to be on a world domination kick. Anyway, BUZZ is scary. Cold and calculating. Patient. And always hungry. Thankful for that firing range and the dog fights. 

He's superior, too. Has an attitude. Very aware we're all one click away from meat-hood. One NRA kind of click. They installed a big tree branch in the room and he sits on that, observing everything.The Tea Party room is poorly staged. 

They were terrified they'd accidently hire a gay guy to design and build the sets. The budget was immense. Something went awry anyway. They wanted Revolutionary Boston and got ALICE IN WONDERLAND. Vibrant 60's colors. They don't walk around the room, they dance. Glide. Very gay, actually.

They didn't even notice the problem with the theme. All bat-shit crazy. The tea is tainted with mercury and other bad stuff. From the plumbing.They made a point of hiring only subs with FUCK THE EPA bumper stickers. So the plumber used some old stock with lead and mercury in it for the pipes and fixtures. 

Same with the teakettle and utensils. It's a mighty toxic tea party. BUZZ doesn't eat or drink there. He only does carrion. Evidently they're like the original assassins. Stoned shock troops. Brain impaired. Under the influence. Or those guys in Somalia. Ripped on something. Drones. Kamikazes. Cruz missiles.

Super destructive. The Tea Party people are purists. Puritans. They will not enter any of the venues where the sordid stuff, as they see it, goes down. They think they're better than everybody else. Wins a lot of friends, as you can imagine, but people don't fuck with them. Because you want them on your side. 

Money is printed on one floor in anticipation of the day when the real federal government collapses utterly. Republicans will then formally take over, though it won't look much different from the way it does now, since the Democrats are already completely powerless. 

How is it they don't see this, the Democrats, and carry on as though they matter? This puzzles even Republicans, but it works out great since they can continue to blame the Democrats for everything.

There's a bank, of course, adjacent to the money printing apparatus, which only launders money for the rich and engages in tax avoidance, the BANK OF CREDIT AND CONVERGENCE, run by Paul CROC-A-DOC Ryan. He's a croc. He also oversees the money factory. Ayn Rand is pictured on the bills. All of them. In different poses. She's a fixation of his. 

To say the books are unbalanced assumes a standard not even known to exist at this bank. Money, called MANNA here, or MAMA, or MAMMORY maybe, I could never make it out, seems to appear out of nowhere. And I mean the real stuff, greenbacks, not their crap, called GALTS.

BCC is a subsidiary of SATYRICORP, a picaresque entity, meaning a shell of seemingly loosely connected parts. In reality the evanescence masks an unbelievable level of cohesion and directedness. It's a monster modelled on the Cali cartel. 

Everything on paper is in story form, so the deniability is huge. They call the articles of incorporation "fables," and the written records "parables" or "vignettes," so everything can be construed on the fly, to their liking.

The tellers at this particular branch are all buxom women in great revealing outfits, out of respect for women generally and their wonderful tits. The bank functions like a huge beneficent tit, in fact, since you can take money out without putting any in. 

This is the TAO OF REPUBLICANISM, the revered PATH or WAY, which is simply honoring the most primitive and honest and honorable of human desires, to be suckled forever. God created the human race this way, in His image, so it must be respected or bad shit will surely happen. 

I wonder if God...? The tit must be, well, indescribable. The symbol for the TAO is a solid circle with a pinkish, smaller round area in the middle. Looks like a Lichtenstein. Or a Wesselmann. Republican men can be treated for sexual problems at a clinic. 

Very, very secret, as you can imagine. An unmarked door. A woman answers in non-clinical looking garb with deep decolletage. You say the pass phrase: "My sword is blunted." The attendent asks, "who are you?" To which you must answer, "Oh, a Lucky Man," to be admitted.

Wet nurses are on hand and used if the treatment, erotic-shock, fails, which it always does. This is overseen by MARKY MARCUS, Michele's real-life husband, who has a special interest or expertise in the treatment of sexual problems. With a success rate of zero, across the board. 

Which is never a problem for Republicans. You should see the HALL OF FAME. Bremers and Bushes, one after another. A HALL OF FAILURE, really. It reassures them of their potency, that they don't have to be good at anything and can still have lives of ever-increasing power and position.

They can be incompetent and arbitrary, and fail and still get promoted, no matter how badly they fuck up. To heaven, ultimately. My God, that prequal. What a powerful thing it is. Real time absolution for everything. And real time reassurance of your rightness.

No matter what you do. Anyway, the patients at the sex clinic, having failed at STIMULUS or STIMULATION, as it is called, are well suckled and turned loose. Ready to screw up some more. Anything but grow up. That they will never do.

Rush, Karl, Mitch, Newt, most of the pasty people, the fat, white, Republican Ascended Masters (RAM's) have been through the clinic. This is why they are so against any kind of stimulus, I suppose. They assume other people are as inert as they are, and as dependent.

They can return to the clinic and suckle as necessary to keep their strength up. ORAL SUPPORT, this is called. Many levels down is the Operations and Control Center, code-named Strange-Love. The staff is never allowed to leave the Center, let alone the building, for security reasons.

At the very lowest level is the power source, the Nuclear Power-Tit. There's a large octagonal room with a geodesic ceiling. An absolutely enormous, perfectly symmetrical tit sits flat in the middle of the room with a tubular structure arising out of the center. 

I had wondered what the tube was, having seen it projecting through the upper floors, and was always told, evasively, "the utility core." I thought it was a silo for an ICBM, an Intra-Continental Ballistic Missile, knowing how Republicans are about security.

A guy named WOODIE is chief engineer, Eric Cantor. He mistook the tube, a cooling tower, for a tree and kept pecking at it, as woodpeckers will do. The tit emits a distinctive hum. 

Nuclear waste is flushed down the toilets, on the advice of their technical staff, after consultation with the private corporations supplying the fuel. Their greatest fear is that the toilets will back up. 

And the crap the lobbyists, sex-workers and drug dealers put down the toilets, you just can't imagine. It's difficult when, for all their lives, Republicans have been taught to take all the good stuff and dump shit wherever you can, to get them to behave in this one instance. But it was the bankers. 

The bankers did them in. The cash coming in was just inconceivable, more than they could launder in a lifetime, so they began to flush the smaller bills down the toilet. Twenties and under. The lowest of the low were forced to do this, the people making hourly wage, for whom the Republicans' contempt is vast. 

Maybe it was sabotage, those folks with nothing flushing all that cash. We'll never know. But you need reliable people in lowly jobs, to be sure, and the Republicans don't get this. You get reliable people by paying them well and treating them decently.

Anyway, the toilets did back up and some sadist, by remote control or automation, locked the place down. They were all trapped in a sea of sludge, radioactive as hell, and died swimming in shit and money. Only one person is thought to have gotten out. 

A mysterious character called THE WICHITA LINEMAN, whose job it was to maintain an enormous cable or conduit running West out of the building and labelled "Wichita." There seems to have been an escape plan for him alone, or he may have executed the lockdown and then fled.

All those colorful characters, the BOEHNER BABIES, lost forever. An ignoble end. It makes me so sad, in spite of their corruption. They were so much fun in an end-times, Sodom and Gomorrah kind of way. They really were only doing what we all would do, given the chance, living like the most unbelievable pigs ever. 

That's the assumption. Wouldn't you?

The Carbuncle of Truth

I'll admit it, I'm unsympathetic to Republicans. But I do understand. They think it's all about VALUES. They think that you have to have values. It trumps everything. Science, the Rule of Law, Equitable Government, you name it. If you don't have values there's no foundation for anything. 

And Liberals don't have values. They don't have standards. Their idea of inclusion is to lower standards. That works. Lower standards enough and you include everybody. 

And all their experts, Liberal experts, come up with the results they want. Reasons to lower standards. Excuses to lower standards.

Republicans want to raise people up. You do that through deprivation. Through neglect. Suffering is ennobling and motivating. Especially in the formative years. 

It's respectful to let people fend for themselves. You honor their independence, that way. Their autonomy.

Otherwise you have a whole class of people, the poor, who sit around and do nothing and get paid for it. And it goes on for generations. 

That's the job of the rich. By taking care of the poor you inadvertently create a culture of failure. Inculcate failure. Maybe not inadvertently. Stupid Democrats.

So what if people die or get killed, from desperation and deprivation. Or just suffer a lot and worry all the time because they don't have any security. That's not a bad outcome. Nor good, really. It's simply the way the world works. 

Try to circumvent it and you only make it worse. The Liberal elite, university professors, for example, and other eggheads, are too removed from reality to see this obvious truth. As when they want to mess with the free market. You are messing with the laws of nature. It will never work.

And they're mostly on the government dime, those experts and eggheads, insulated from the utter purity and integrity of the private sector, where competition rules. Where they would no doubt get their asses kicked and fail. So they're biased. They just want to keep their easy jobs and comfy lives.

For unbiased opinions you turn to the private sector. Like those white boys who ran the tobacco companies. Not that they didn't know tobacco is addicting as hell, but they see the greater truth, that people make a choice to smoke and deserve whatever happens, as a result. Fuck them, in other words.

The private sector guys have no incentive to lie. Okay, maybe they're paid ten times what they're worth. But they had to compete for that. It's hard getting through Choate or Exeter in one piece. And some massive sunburn on those vacations. And it was tough at Yale when you didn't have the chops to be there in the first place. 

Got in by legacy. Then got a job through a friend of the family. So they won, and nobody can say it wasn't fair. Or they'll call daddy. They get to take whatever they can. That's freedom. That's fairness. In their world. Victors and spoils. Again, fuck you. 

The Republican platform right there in two words. And their foreign policy. So the Liberals go out and get some scientist and he says there's global warming, or some such crap. Obvious nonsense. It's part of their plot to end life on the planet as we know it. 

But they're so removed from reality, or have imbibed their own herbal Kool-Aid, and they believe it. And on this basis they want to fuck with free enterprise. Crazy.

So you nullify it. You deny it. If there were global warming Americans would no longer be able to pursue their common dream, an absolute orgy of consumption. 

Totally irresponsible consumption. The Democrats just want to throw a bunch of sand into that amazing consumption machine. Out of perversion, I suppose. I mean perversity.

It's there somewhere in the Bible, surely. Soaking up the world's resources like a huge belching baby is an essential American value. And God's will. Drill, baby, drill. 

Their cheerleader said that. It's Christian. God gave us the planet for that. Invented America for that. You must not fuck with it. It's our destiny.

But the Republicans understand some things as well so they don't come out and say overtly what they really think, that if you ain't been saved you don't know shit, because they know it sounds bad. 

We're not supposed to have State Religion. Separation and all that. So they talk about values and standards and stuff. Tone it down. Use secular language. Then there's the other Republicans who are just cynical and greedy but that's different. 

Still, even though they've gone secular on the language about values, toned it down, and speak what is obviously true, the idiot Democrats don't get it. They don't see the point about values. The importance of values.

Look at Rush. They say he wouldn't know an honest day's work if it sat on his face and yet he criticizes other people day and night, but he is just frustrated at the incomprehensible ignorance of the Democrats. He feels it so deeply. The tragedy of declining values.

He uses the secular language even, like "idiots" and "morons," in hope the Democrats will come around. He could just give up on them or call them all traitors and fatwa them. Issue an edict on the propriety of their annihilation, that is. Turn the militias loose on them.

But he just disenfranchises them, to the extent that he can, out of compassion. Nullifies elections and stuff. Tries to keep them from voting. To protect our demonic institutions and traditions. I mean democratic. He does it because he cares. 

Anyway, so the Republicans are letting the world in on their secret. To help save the country from the Democrats. And the Democrats from damnation. From perdition. From their own stupidity.

Maybe now the idiot, apostate Liberals will get a clue, when they're confronted with the awesomeness of the secret. Maybe even some Muslims will see the light. This could be a turning point.

It's Rush's carbuncle. The CARBUNCLE OF TRUTH. You see, Rush has this boil on his--well, they won't say out of respect. But they do speculate about which cheek, if that tells you anything. Most say the right one, but that may just be some bias. 

Anyway, somehow this thing knows the truth. Maybe it's just Rush's constitution expressing itself through the boil. No matter. Rush can tell whether something is true or not by the boil. It reacts or looks or feels different, somehow. Hell, maybe it speaks to him. I don't know.

But this is the thing. People with values recognize other people with values and so they have a sort of truth club going. And when someone like Rush is validated by his success and all the money he makes it's obvious beyond doubt that he's the real deal and will speak only the truth. 

And he has the carbuncle which his wife, God bless her, tends every night when they go to bed. I mean, what else would you do? It's an honor, I'm sure.

She's an Addams, you know. A member of one of America's most important families ever. If we weren't already certain Rush was right, that would seal it. She's a cousin of Cousin Itt, they say. They have their pet Addams Family names for one another. Medusa and Groucho.

Their butler is named Lurch, in honor. It's confusing, though, because Rush is always screaming for his lunch, which he just loves. He gets all red and swollen-looking with impatience and then Lurch shows up without his lunch, at which point Rush reaches full boil, so to speak, but they put up with it.

Now the Addams Family is as good as it gets, if you want great lineage in America. Near nobility. Class. Look at how they live. Cultured. Leisured. In a mansion with no visible means of support, a sure sign of God's favor. They take care of the aged parents. There's values for you. Of course Rush is rich as shit. God's approval made manifest.

Back to the boil. Just look at how the Declaration of Independence begins. A criterion for truth. THE criterion for truth. SELF-EVIDENCE. The truth is self-evident or is made self-evident, to non-idiots. 

It expresses itself. Now that should settle it, this statement in our founding documents, if the Democrats weren't so irritatingly obstinate about facts and reason and that rubbish.

Human reason is so weak, so those with values don't go there. To them the truth is MANIFEST. It expresses itself to them. Like a boil popping up out of nowhere. You just have to recognize it for what it is. They know it when they see it. Like socialism and all that shit. If there's any doubt, they turn to Rush. And the boil.

And Rush is manifest as hell. I mean all over the place. There's no denying the man. He's a presence. And he's prescient. But not president. I just liked the way that sounded. Anyway, once you get to the true criterion, self-evidence, all is clear. 

You know the truth. It is made manifest to you and through you. You are free from doubt. And the truth is manifest in and through special people like Rush. Especially them. They're special.

So if one of your guys, like that one president, fucks everything up beyond comprehension, gets hundreds of thousands of people killed and causes untold suffering, you don't worry about it. You still know you're indisputably right. 

That's called faith. It's incredibly comforting. And if you're feeling weak, having a bad day or whatever, you can rely on Rush to know the truth and defend it.

Conversely, the other side, the idiot Democrats, can't be right no matter what they do. Thay're existentially wrong. Like our current president. I can't even speak his name. He was wrong before he even got into office. Before he did anything. 

So if he somehow does good stuff and stops wars and feeds children and shit he's still wrong. In a better world we would impeach his ass. Like the last guy. For lack of values.

It's self-evident and made manifest through the righteous. The truth. Through people with values. Like Tom Delay and that crowd. But to remove all doubt we have Rush's boil. 

Rush himself, I hear, doesn't know how he does it. Why he was chosen. He was going to submit the boil for study but the hospitals are full of heathen and rationalists.

Then he found some medical professionals with good values. Graduates of Patrick Henry. Home schooled before that. They said they could remove the boil and it would continue to function, they thought, because it was on a huge slab of flab. They would then lipo the other, you know, cheek and all would be well. Rush might even look better. Have a better figure.

It all went south, though, in the execution. Evidently Rush kind of exploded. It turns out he was, himself, a kind of boil. They stuck in a needle or scalpel and he blew up like a huge pimple. 

Witnesses, those not too near the blast, said they thought they saw his soul ascend to heaven in an enormous cloud of vaporized pus.

Those right at the scene were slimed bad but they hosed one another off and carried on, considering it an honor to have been present at the ascension. There's a monument planned at the sight. A shrine.

The miraculous boil is presumed lost. Wait, no, the wife has found it, a holy relic, near the site of the explosion. On the slab of flab. Intact. Her uncle, Fester, is there and he's evidently expert at nurturing boils. In the basement of the manse. They take it there.

We are saved from the infidels. The boil lives on. Just need to figure out how to communicate with the thing. Someone, surely, will have the gift. Maybe Wednesday. Or Pugsley. They say they will let us know.

They'll put out a movie, the wife says. ADDAMS FAMILY VALUES, or something like that, which will contain the latest from the boil. They promise. So the faithful will not want for guidance.

But you know how scripts get messed around. So the message may be in code. Ciphered or something. Or code language, anyway. Between the lines. A message for Republicans from the boil. In the movie. Watch for it.

It's Christmas in Conyers

So I haven't posted in a while. My old dog, Harley, got gradually more impaired and finally died. I can't talk about it.

But I can talk about the Republicans. I've been busy there just trying to keep tabs on the range and intensity of the bad thinking. And evil-doing. It's a job in itself. And I already have a job. But when principle is held hostage to politics, and policy to privilege, the quantity of bad stuff that can happen is more than you can keep up with. 

They don't do bad shit they ARE bad shit. That's what I'm saying. So the evil-doing is effortless. It flows from them unconsciously and without conspiracy or contrivance. They don't need to contrive anything. They live inside of it, a world of unease, mistrust and suspicion. Restlessness rooted in fear.

There's no such thing as principle in their world. No right or wrong. Just the elemental drives of greed and lust for power and lust. As in SEX, on that last one. Some primordial version of lust, anyway. Primordial and generalized and inchoate and all enmeshed with fear. 

A similarly primordial fear. Rising in the depths of their brains like swamp gas. And, man, they must all have some horrible mental version of indigestion. To be so mean. So pessimistic, fatalistic and ornery.

There's the final frontier, the scene of the deciding battle, this imagined world of threats. A drama unconnected to reality. They latch onto all this stuff they're defending. Lately the Constitution is a biggie. Religion is always a biggie. Delusional, of course, but that's their world. 

A fabricated home for their fears. Some fucking board game they've created. OLIGOPOLY, maybe. Whatever. How they must miss the cold war and the commies. They don't know how to live in a world without enemies. So they invent them.

The Constitution needs defending indeed. Now that they're on the scene. From them. And Christianity. Waterboarders for Jesus. Great idea, guys. Karl Rove cook that one up? Oh, no. It probably came from the CheneyFeld MasterMind. The over-soul of their Reich. 

Their cloud-server thing. The shared consciousness of their movement. A repository of fear. Justifications for fear. With Ann Coulter there keeping an eye on the place in a little cocktail-waitress dress. The sane only go there to see what they're up against. And with a cyanide pill. In case they get stuck.

Here they are, those Republicans, living in what is probably the best place ever at the best time ever, E PLURIBUS UNUM, and they're chronically scared shitless. And so always on the attack. 

A political philosophy that propagates itself like rabies. You bite people and they get it, the disease. Everybody dies in the end. What fun! I wish they would keep their death wish to themselves. 

So they're an army of Don Quixotes. And Sanchos. Living their delusions. Strange how honor cultures are the most dishonorable places imaginable. Quixote was funny and pathetic. And old and incompetent. The Republicans are competent. And not funny. 

Unless you think it's funny to have crazy people attacking you. Thay're damn good at what they do, the Wrecking Crew. So when they lower their lance at you, or cradle their spear or whatever, I suggest you run. They'll skewer your ass. To save the Constitution and Christianity. 

There's one place above all where the Republicans, led by the Southern White Boys, won't tolerate fair competition. From the black guys, especially. SEX. The White Women. You know what they say about the black guys. 

The Republicans know they're losers on this front. So they limit the competition. Protect their mojo. What mojo they have. Money mojo. Gun mojo. 

The White Boy Republicans all need deep analysis on this one. Freudian. Maybe the Twelve Steps. Or Christianity. No, they already think they're Christian. But they're running away from something that's strapped to their ass. 

They empower it themselves, the fear. And they make it real, create it, by believing in it so strongly. They attack the imagined enemy and those folks defend themselves thereby reassuring the attackers that they were right in the first place. Makes me feel dizzy. 

Anyway let's just stipulate that they're good at it, the evil-doing. Watch that movie on Lee Atwater, BOOGIE MAN. And the Bill Moyers thing on Jack "The Hack" Abramoff. It's all there. The Moyers piece begins with an interview of Thomas Frank.

The latest in my series, REPUBLICAN REMAKES OF AMERICAN CLASSIC MOVIES, is WHITE CHRISTMAS. There's a chorus of Southern White Boys. They sing the song WHITE CHRISTMAS a lot. 

There's a huge painted eye on a backdrop behind them. It blinks twice quickly every time they sing the word "white" in the song. The last time they sing it, in the denouement, they appear in white robes. It's the only song they sing. 

Fear causes people to cut a deep groove. NASCAR deep. See my post on that. You dig yourself a hole. Build a wall. Limit everything. For protection. From the imagined enemy. You need certainty. And simplicity. Literalism. 

Your world is already so unstable you can't tolerate any additional uncertainty. So you retreat. From reality. And attack your imagined enemies.  Ultimately you retreat from life. Because life is fear. Life equals fear. You crave death, in a way. The Apocalypse. 

But it's strapped to your ass so in the hole it goes with you. The fear. Right there with you. Unconscious. Subliminal. I don't think "strapped to your ass" is the technical Freudian term, but it conveys the point. You dig deeper. A deeper hole. 

You try to unload the fear. Find a home for it. A focus. It's the Commies. The Liberals. Government. The Secularists. Muslims. The Relatives. I mean Relativists. Whatever. It doesn't matter. You even unload it on the people in the hole with you. You turn on them.

Or, since the destruction you crave seems to be on its own schedule, in spite of your efforts, a gated community might do as a good place to await the Second Coming. Closest thing to a fort, on the residential front. 

A virtual gated community if you can't afford a real one. Keep the riffraff out. Your fellow citizens, that is. Especially the black ones. Oh, right, they're already fenced off. In jail. 

So back to the movie. We're in a getaway now, a lodge of some sort, at Stone Mountain some distance from Conyers, Georgia. The crowd is all from Conyers. From the gated communities. 

They're there at Christmas-time to practice a play, RUSHBO AND THE NIGHT VISITOR, which will be presented at the country club back in Conyers as part of the Christmas pageant. Right after the Nativist Play. Nativity, that is. No matter. 

In RUSHBO a black guy with dreadlocks knocks on a door in an exclusive white neighborhood in search of food and shelter, or some free shit, no doubt. It's the home of Rushbo O'Reilly and his wife Fannie. 

Rushbo blows the guy to tatters with the handy twelve gauge. Both barrels. Little hair things all over the yard. Dreads. The neighborhood kids take them as souvenirs.

Rushbo had no reason to think the guy was a threat but best to be safe. It was dark out. And a darkie, out there, in the dark. Who wouldn't be concerned. He looked kind of scary. 

In silhouette. That's about all Rushbo could see. BEST TO BE SAFE. DEFEND THE RIGHTS. STAND YOUR GROUND. He was in his own home. At worst he was inhospitable.

The commies try Rushbo for exercising his rights. The black guy might have had head lice and who knows what else, argues Rushbo's super-expensive attorney, Randy Rankin. The spectators all run home to burn their kids' souvenirs.

Rushbo is acquitted and all is well. The Conyers crowd is feeling all warm, fuzzy and optimistic.

But there's another visitor to Rushbo's home, the health nurse. There's been a nasty outbreak of venereal disease in Conyers, and Rushbo's daughter, Lulu Belle, is thought to be infected. She is, in fact, and she's pregnant as well. By the black guy Rushbo blew to bits. 

Must be why he came knocking, dreads and all. Gave her a baby. And VD. He was the vector. Rushbo doesn't know the word but he doesn't like the sound of it. Typical black, commie, liberal, secular shit. Fucking vectors.

The health nurse schedules a meeting in the gym at Stonewall High School. It's really a presentation by her trying to get through to the parents. Their kids are screwing up a storm. And to get them to get their kids to take the test. The VD test. 

Finally, in frustration, she projects a diagram onto a big screen showing their kids, as nodes, connected to one another by lines representing sexual contact. Now their kids are nodes, thinks Rushbo. Fucking commies. 

Wow. Fucking wow. The air is sucked entirely out of the room, mostly by the moms. The dads think they were born too soon. The visual is unbelievable. You can barely see the background. The black guy, Jesus, RIP, is in the middle, like a huge sun with innumerable rays emanating. 

Emanating on their daughters. He has to be right in the middle or it makes the thing impossible, he was so sexually active. 

The country club crowd realizes at some point that the play they'd commissioned, on the honorable defense of one's home by a noble, fat-ass white man, had been commandeered and corrupted by gay pinko secular yankee scum and turned into a commie mess. 

They been hijacked. As though any such thing could happen in Conyers. In their gated communities. All that illicit sex. And VD. And Jesus. And vectors and nodes. Laughable.

Turns out it was a guy, Pole Corter, working on the thing. Their play. With his partner. And I mean partner. Should have known. Damn art crowd. Jews, Gypsies, Gays, all the worst elements. 

Probably raised on NPR. Got to defund that. Word is, Pole has a big one. For a white guy. God knows what he does with it.

There was a great song, though, in the play, EVERYTHING BLOWS. About declining standards. Hate to lose that. Very catchy. Have to work it into the new play, an old standard, THE MAN OF LA MUNCHA, or something like that. 

Need to check that title. Sounds like a guy who likes to eat pussy. God it's hard to bring up kids these days. So glad it can't happen in Conyers. 

Anyway, the new play is all about chivalry and nobility and ass-kicking. Good stuff. Quixote and Sancho. Great female role, Dulcinea del Tabasco, or something like that. A spicy dish indeed. Like to eat some of.... Oops! 

The play has been brought up to date with a pig-picking at the end. Under the monument at Stone Mountain. A monument honoring some real patriotic Americans. Ass-kickers, too. 

Notwithstanding that they were traitors. Just exercising their rights, really. To nullify. Anything and everything. Like those stupid Yankees who tried to nullify the Fugitive Slave Act. But our guys nullified the right stuff. Like the Constitution. 

The Conyers crowd is so pleased with the new play they decide to have a pickin' under the hallowed monument themselves, at the end of their stay. Oh, man, life is good. Nothing like some 'cue and a cold one. 

But there's a story circulating about a cell call from a health nurse. Something going on back in Conyers. Everyone calls the kids. Everything's fine, say the kids. Just hanging out watching TV. 

Watching some videos. Of course it's good stuff they're watching. Wholesome. Stuff that would pass the Jesus test. And they're having sandwiches. All is well.

So here ends the remake, WHITE CHRISTMAS, with the chorus crooning the song in their moth-eaten Klan robes beneath the great monument at Stone Mountain. Actually, damn, those robes are in great shape. I mean starched and shit. 

Oh, well. Mighty glad we got the Constitution to protect those personal freedoms. For everyone. The rule of law. For everyone. A fair shake. For everyone. Except Jesus, I guess. But that was just a play. Fiction. Commie pinko fiction. 

There WAS another song in the movie. I forgot. It plays with the credits. The white guys singing about the black guys. Struggling with the lyrics. Looking hard at their sheets, confused: "They got rhythm, they got music, they got my gal, who could ask..." 

They do this as though they're learning the song, singing it for the first time. Every time they hit the word "gal" they get all agitated. Who wrote this shit. Some Jew, no doubt. 

That's why they want to get back to the old days. And the old ways. When men was men and niggers was niggers. It's so hard being white. Upholding standards. Oh, well.

http://www.pbs.org/wgbh/pages/frontline/shows/georgia/etc/synopsis.html

Frat America

There's another element to the Republican takeover of everything I haven't mentioned. It's OIL. Not OPERATION IRAQI LIBERATION. The black stuff. Here we're talking real addiction. Serious denial. Arrested development. Misappropriation. Misrepresentation. Criminality. Conflicted interest. Bad faith. Bad manners. Squandered resources. Lying, lying, lying. Got to feed the habit. As always, like any addict, they end up stealing from family. From us.

The Dems are well implicated in this too, but they're responsible social drinkers by comparison. The Republicans are screaming petroholics. It's twelve steps or the ditch for them. And so, sadly, for all of us. They're dragging us along with them. And we're enablers as long as we allow it.

Maybe we'll get lucky. Get a DUI. A wake up call. Be forced to deal. Had a couple close calls already. That 70's oil shock. And, notably, 9/11. Real DUI on that one, I'd say, now that I think about it. And did we question ourselves, the way of life? Look in the mirror? No way. We lashed out. Like an ignorant, wasted frat boy at a bar. Went out and blew stuff up.

The degree of the failure after 9/11 shows just how far gone we are, how ripped on the juice. The failure of leadership, to an incomprehensible degree. To think that America ever had the world's sympathy to the extent that we did, and where we went from there, it makes you ill.

And, no less distressing, to think that we ever stood for something besides consuming the world's resources as quickly and desperately as possible. The memory fades. And it's all based on OIL. And some flaw in the national character, I guess. Predisposition and opportunity.

There's been no reckoning, of course, on our catastrophic reaction to 9/11. That's the nature of denial. Of addiction. Same people running shit. All the architects of the disaster carrying on as though they hadn't been proved wrong. On everything. On strategy and tactics. On conception and execution. On planning and implementation. On vision. Total fucking failure.

We're living in the world of ANIMAL HOUSE here. Been to a frat party and gotten smashed on the petro punch. Frat America. We're hungover, and drunk, and still drinking, all at the same time. We're never sober. So you deal with a tragedy like 9/11 like idiots. Never asking why about anything because the guys flying the planes are supplying the booze, the crude. Their peeps anyway. That's the one thing that can't stop, that supply.

And, in 2000, we had elected Bluto president. A pig. A pernicious pig. The guy who will drink until he dies, knocking down the crude. The guy who lives on the assumption no one has to clean up the mess, get up in the morning, go to class, get a job, get out of bed even. Let alone grow up. Living off mommy and daddy. Got fetal alcohol syndrome, petro version. You could see it in the eyes.

And he'll suck the vulnerable down into the pig vortex. The shit vortex. Suck everyone down. So we had exactly the wrong guy in place at the time. To say there was a problem of character doesn't even begin to get it. He wasn't even in the arena, living on an island of addiction to the crude, out of sight of shore. An island called, let's say, Texas. The absence of addiction is inconceivable in that world. It's all they know.

A guy like this can do a lot of harm even kept around as a kind of jester. A human amusement. The guy who defines the lowest possible level of existence, making everyone else look better by comparison. But, my god, you don't want him running things. We've seen the results of that.

Point is, however, he wasn't really running things. Somebody else was. Still is. He was a prop. A stooge. An idiot anti-savant. Ignoramus. Operating well below shill level in the great Republican ponzi scheme based on our tax dollars. The backward child of the upper classes. The type usually institutionalized at an asylum at great expense.

I recently watched the original UPSTAIRS, DOWNSTAIRS again after many years. Kept thinking of Junior, our illustrious 43rd, in relation to James, the upstairs crowd's son and heir. James was solid by comparison. He actually went to war. Risked his life. But, overall, James would be characterized by cluelessness, self-centeredness, and incompetence. He's likable though. Disarmingly. Most of the time. When he isn't running into walls.

One telling moment among many: James gets told that Rose, head house-maid, is leaving. Getting married and leaving the country, actually. Has a life of her own, thank you. James wants to know, who's going to bring him his coffee. Like now. Rose has been there, a big part of family life, forever. And it doesn't register what's going on. That he should care or at least feign caring about her. 

Rose's life isn't real to James. It's subsumed into the family's functional existence. This is to say she has no existence of her own to James. Kind of like the young Americans Bluto shipped off to fight in Iraq. This is called racism, I think, or classism, or something. Anyway it's not good. It's Republicanism. 

James eventually blew Rose's money in the markets. She had stuck around, turns out, after all, and inherited her former fiancee's money when he died in the war. James meant well. 

James kills himself which, again, shows his staggering moral superiority in relation to Junior. What, me worry? That's our guy's attitude. No conscience at all. Must have been excised or irradiated. Assuming he had one to start.

Look at all the Americans whose lives have been wrecked under the Republican Reign of Error. Wrecked as in dead or mutilated, in the case of some of those sent off to Iraq. 

Or Afghanistan. Young Americans, many of whom joined the military because they couldn't get jobs. Couldn't get jobs because the Republicans had sent their jobs to China, or obliterated them in other insidious and stupid ways. So they throw up a smokescreen of patriotism, the national interest, security, whatever, to obscure the carnage and their stupidity, those Republicans.

And wrecked, other American lives, as in working harder and harder for less. And wrecked as in not having health care. And wrecked as in not having hope. Not being able to assume anything about the quality of your future existence. Or quantity, given the health care. They want to take it all away, the Republicans. Allocate resources to feed the addiction. Stoke the fires. Have toga parties on their yachts.

Pretty obvious when, of all the imaginable, meaningful issues the country might tackle, the Republicans become obsessed with the DEATH TAX. They care only about themselves. All the while from the wars, from everything, money accumulates in Republican coffers. Enormous silos of cash. Just seems to happen. Poof. They swear it's all fair, legit, above-board. Incidental to the normal operation of free markets. That it's their due. That's their opinion, as disinterested parties.

None of it is real to Junior or to America's new Republican plutocracy. It doesn't register, the suffering, the destruction, the despair. It's almost unfair to say they don't give a shit. They're just not in that world. They're insulated. As insulated as they can make themselves. Impenetrable armor of ignorance. Force field of obliviousness. And they're going to heaven, they believe. The ignorance, the lack of culpability, they get to keep it. For eternity. That's their idea. Cool model. Doesn't ring biblical to me, exactly. But what do I know.

And then there's the damage we've done to the rest of the world, which I don't even mean to get into. The insulation here is easier not so much because of the physical separation but because the people can't vote. They have to spend a fortune peddling lies to us, at least. And the alcoholic stupor of consumption helps on the domestic front. Dulls the awareness. Keep consuming, sucking it all in, and don't stop to think about anything.

We sold our souls cheap, people. For shit we didn't need. Non-essentials. Not food, shelter, clothing. Who's the buyer of our souls, in this sad-ass Faust story? The American version of that English upper class?

Who's running shit, behind the scenes? Paying the shills, suckering the suckers, pulling Junior's strings? It's corporations and the corporatists. This isn't even good drama. This is banal. No Charles Manson. No swastikas. No Darth.

We do the bad stuff the way the English did it, in our new class culture, as you would expect. With decorum. With self-righteousness. With composure. The stiff lip. The immobile, pasty complexion. 

Talk to me about it. I'm Irish, by descent. Ever read about the Irish famine? Genocide by incompetence. Willful neglect. Malignant carelessness. Crass, self-interested, criminal stupidity.

But wait, who empowered the corporations and the corporatists? We did. We voters. We fucking idiot voters.

Hang on.

I'm back. Had to check the mirror, the forehead, for the swastika. Not there. Thank God? We should all get them, like ashes, on Ash Wednesday. Serve us right. Because we enable the enablers, the corporatists. Kind of circular sounding, which is what you expect, I suppose, in a closed system of denial, when you can't acknowledge the addiction, the dependency.

It's a perpetual motion, squirrel cage kind of thing. Our whole, huge, unsustainable economy. And the thinking underlying it. The rationalizations. We're all implicated. Perpetual as long as you ignore the enormous energy subsidy, the addicting agent, the OIL. That'll take the perpetual out of that machine, if you take away the oil. So we're all living on borrowed time. Borrowing from the past and the future. Anything to keep the addiction alive.

That should be our motto. In Latin, on all the national stuff. ON BORROWED TIME. Like "Videri Quam Esse." Yes, Mr Colbert, I saw that. So we've all had to empower the inner idiot in ourselves in an ongoing, seat-of-the-pants sort of way, to keep it all going. It's required, denial, to live in this exploding plastic inevitable (sorry to lose you, Lou) consumption machine of ours. Too painful otherwise, to not quell the awareness.

I've depressed myself. That's the problem, there, in a nut. Who wants to look at this crap straight on. It hurts too much. We had it made. All we had to do was not blow it, and we screwed up so badly. For nothing. No Star Wars. No white hats or black. No winners. Lots of losers. We've seen the enemy and it's ourselves.

But there's hope, I'll tell you. It's OIL. The Republican ponzi scheme is real, as is the inevitable reckoning, but it's different because we're pulling money from outside the system, in the form of OIL. Could save our irresponsible asses.

Which means maybe the inevitable isn't inevitable. 

We may get away with it if we stop. Now. Did we stop yet? Time to grow up. Graduate. Get a job. Get productive. The model ain't the frat, it's the family. We have to get it through our fucking heads, we really are in it together. Got to start behaving like grown-ups.

Vroom, Vroom

I have another play, in the conceptual stages, titled CLOSED LOOP. Usual deal, like my others: simple staging, and a chorus of southern white boys. Supposed to be evocative of James Dean in REBEL, stylistically. Maybe Mitchum in THUNDER ROAD.

Here I use NASCAR as representative of the Republican mindset. Especially Southern Republicans. See, you burn up a ton of resources in order to drive around in a circle. Can't even reverse direction. Never escape the track. Enclosed. Controlled. And it's a privately owned sport.

So-called sport. Completely cut off from reality. Huge barriers to entry. Plantation size. It's expensive as hell. So it's not very fair, very welcoming, very created-equal, to those lacking capital. How very Republican. And Southern. Exclusive. Non-competitive. Like elections, ideally. Like everything, ideally.

The chorus are the pit crew. They dance, too. There are girls scattered around in skimpy dress. Everyone biding time, I suppose, until Jesus waves the checkered flag, a huge one, signaling an end to the great race of life. Then they all go to heaven, even the girls in the skimpies. If they been saved. So the ennui, it makes sense, watching a bunch of cars going nowhere, if life is just something you wait around to escape from.

Maybe the four horsemen will descend from the sky and take a few victory laps for Jesus, when that day arrives. Get raptured, the spectators. Right there at the event, from the stands. Don't repeat that. The NASCAR crowd will take it seriously. Start bringing crap to the track. Salvation aids. Maybe signs. "Hi, Jesus".

Who knows what. Help them get raptured. Make sure none of the righteous get missed. Hang on, there are strange clouds on the horizon. Not like any I've seen before. I think I see images in those clouds. Didn't mean to be a doubter there, Lord.

Then, whoa, a new breed appears, at the track. New kind of drivers, and cars. Here the mood goes to MAD MAX. They don't play by the rules. Crash the gates. Start driving around the wrong way, in the middle of a race. The cars have all kinds of sharp shit sticking out.

And hood ornaments: Ryan, Cruz, Rand, Michele, their belle. In chrome, burnished, all sleaked back, deco style. Big ones, kind of phallic.

These guys, they want to get back to purity. They're puritans. Back to the roots of stock car. In crime. Bootleggers, avoiding the law. The race deteriorates or is elevated, maybe, into a demolition derby. Enormous mess. Think war zone. Iraq.

Burned out hulks of cars. Others still afire. Drivers scattered about with limbs missing, guts spilling out. Pit crew going ape-shit, jumping around. The girls, in the skimpies, looking a little smoky and singed.

They win, of course, the new guys. If you can call this winning. They do. Here the mood goes to BEN HUR. They carry their muse, Sarah, around the track in an enormous sedan chair, all done up like Cleopatra. Celebrating, triumphant, they knock down the hooch.

The crowd doesn't know whether to cheer or what. These guys are well-funded, clearly, and they respect that instinctively. Privilege. They love privilege. Keeps the riff-raff at bay.

They kind of cheered for Iraq, all that chaos, after all. The NASCAR crowd. And their kin actually fought there, unlike the guys who started it. Reconstructive surgery of a sort, on the heathen, those Iraqis.

Uncivilized lot. Don't know Jesus. Made things better there. More Christian. Didn't we? Hate to think Billy Bob got his balls blown off for nothing.

But then, oh fuck, this was just practice. The primaries. Sarah is dropped, unceremoniously marooned, in the infield, looking about for an innocent moose to murder. Her blood's up. She was only a prop. Even they know that.

They hop back in their cars, decorated now with severed heads and other body parts on pikes, on the pointy protuberances, on the hood ornaments, and head back out through the crashed gates. Onto I-40. Wrong way, of course, making mayhem. They're taking the show on the road.

All of America must be purified of the taint, of the sin, of secularity. Got to get back to God. Back to the roots. Religify the country. The government. Bring them back to God, if you have to kill them to do it. That's one way, actually, the way of the Inquisition.

Meet your maker in church or at the pearlies, the great gates, with Saint Peter presiding, bouncer at the great bar at the end of the universe. God's night club, if you will. If Peter is hungover Jake will be there. Jake Neal. He used to be bouncer at HELL. That's a bar. Used to be.

Looking back, this one may be better suited to film. Get a director. Someone good at special effects. More possibilities that way. Bring out all the apocalyptic undertones. Not so under, really, on the tones. Pretty up-front. The tea gang think they're in league with the Lord, hanging around yearning for the second coming.

Impatient for it. It's an insult to God, somehow, to try to make the world better. It's supposed to be shit. They're reassured when it's shit. So, hey, they get proactive. Why wait around when you can go out and bust stuff up. In the name of Jesus, no less. Doing God's work.

So you would have hoped they'd be content to live in their own hell-hole, but no. They want that for everybody. In the best interests of our salvation. They're looking out for us, ruining our lives. Wish they wouldn't tread on me.

They kind of are the apocalypse, themselves, in slow motion. Bet they like the sound of that. Apocalypse, now! Uh-oh, reports coming in on the I-40 situation. Maybe not so slo-mo, on the destruction. They're getting the job done there. Big tactical advantage, when you don't give a shit about anything.

While we're at it there's another play in the works, in the think tank of my brain. A STREETCAR NAMED DESPAIR, all about Paul Ryan. He's the main character, the protagonist. This one has a chorus of dockworkers, burly as hell, all in wife-beaters, as is Ryan.

There's a catchy tune, WE'RE RANDY FOR AYN, during the singing of which there are assorted spats in the chorus, and a little blood. There are scratch-and-sniff cards with the smell of those guys in the chorus, after a long work day. Earthy to say the least, with a hint of bear-breath. I mean beer-breath.

Ryan plays himself. Who better. His wife, Stella, is jealous as hell, and weirded out by Paul's devotion to Ayn. Ryan has a little shrine at home, in the spare bedroom, stage right, in their dingy apartment. It's an altar to Ayn, with candles and such.

There's a weekly poker game, and the guy who fares worst gets shit beat out of him by the others at the end of the night. This keeps a nice edge on everything. Very randy. I mean Randian.

All the guys in the chorus lose their jobs, as does Ryan, when their company gets bought out by Bain. The pension plan is declared overfunded, on the basis of very optimistic earnings forecasts, by home-schooled economists right out of Patrick Henry. It's pillaged to the bone.

They're distraught, understandably, and ready to kill Ryan, who had persuaded them to de-unionize. Then, ex-machina, Mitt himself is lowered down in a big, boardroom-style chair. Black suit, white shirt, tie. Stage center. Hair neatly greased, right out of the eugenics lab, by all appearances. Scratch and sniff. Cologne, after-shave, pomade, hint of cognac.

He tries to calm the chorus, reassure them. All will be well. Ryan hops aboard, pretty much in Mitt's lap, as he slowly ascends. Turns out Ryan's been special economic advisor all along, to Bain. On their payroll. Helping Mitt make money. Guys are now visible either side of Mitt, suspended on cables, in SWAT gear.

This is an extraction, an op. The helicopter hovers. The boys are still trying to get their hands on Ryan. But he's going, going, gone, off to the lair, their hide-out, at the bastian of the Boehnerites, in some crevice in the mountains. An inverted Shangri-La where there's ten coolies for every white boy.

The news comes in on the radio. The economy is in free fall. It's 2008. Ryan, on the side, has been advising the government to deregulate everything, for years, destabilizing capital markets. So Mitt and the plunderers can make more money.

The pension is toast. Nonexistent. Whole world has gone Enron. Stella enters from the kitchen, stage left, with grilled cheese sandwiches for the guys. And water. Not enough money for beer. They attack the shrine, enraged to insanity, as Stella flees back to the kitchen.

They find all kinds of incriminating stuff in the debris, at the shrine, and realize the extent of the plot. Whole government is compromised. All the regulating agencies, bought off. Staffed with shills. There's no one to turn to. Images emerge in their minds of an assault, the storming of the Bastille, Fort Boehner.

They're aware, at the same time, of the futility, their helplessness, their powerlessness. They can't do anything. Scratch and sniff. Despair, overpowering everything. With a hint of rot-gut. These hard-working Americans, they're headed for the streets.

Maybe the gutters. They know it. Hope? Nope. So say the Boehner boys. And Rove's platoon of pussies, the chicken-hawks. Rich boys jealously guarding their piles of loot.

They're Shifty

Since the Supreme Court has certified corporations as shape-shifters it's only right that the other branches adjust their thinking. Keep up with the times. If a corporation can morph at will from business to person, person to business, that opens the gates. Maybe they're both at the same time. No matter. But, I mean, what the fuck ELSE are they?

The laws and regulations need to reflect this. They're uncertain entities, corporations. So we're talking probabilities. Quantum stuff. Very Heisenberg. Not the one that broke bad. You know what I mean. And you can't regulate 'em if you can't find 'em, pin 'em down. They're amorphous. And out of our purview as of now. We'll need special shit on the regulatory front. New tools for new times.

You say they're self-regulating? Invisible hand? Whose hand would that be? Some market thing? Wait a minute I think we've stumbled onto something here. They're going back, way back, to a state-of-nature. Pre-civilization. Dog eat dog. Winner take all.

They're de-criminalizing everything. For themselves. Not for us. We have to live by the rules. So invisible as in non-existent, on the hand. They just do what they want. Should have said so. This IS very Heisenberg. Not the uncertainty dude, the one that broke bad. This is the world of drug lords, their new corporate working environment.

See they're all potentially rogue entities, those corporations. Renegade states-within-states. Unregulated entities, possibly unregulatable, with a mandate to maximize the short term bottom line at the expense of everything else. Period. It's required. It's what corporations do.

Can't look out for the employees, the scum, or the national interests. They're bound not to if it conflicts with the profit (the holy grail, omega point, salvation, orgasm, best thing ever, etc). Some fool interferes? Waste his ass.

They're laws unto themselves. Neat model. You live by one set of rules. Everyone else, another. All to their advantage of course. That's fairness in their world. All the advantages of enfrachisement, citizenship, without the responsibilities.

So it's not about respecting or breaking laws per se. There aren't any laws. None that apply to them, outside their system. None that they're actually subject to in real-life circumstances. Just means and ends. They make it up on the fly, what's allowed, to suit their needs. Isn't that what you would do if you could? See, they are like people.

So corporations are corporations, and people, and what else? States, functionally. Beginning to sound like it since they enact their own laws, or at least aren't subject to ours.

This resonates with something in my past, deep in the drawers. Been packed away in the memory banks. Got it. Oh my god, they're gods! Three but one. Triune. States, corps, peeps, all at once.

All the power and no responsibility. Answerable only to themselves. Omnipotent. Or damn powerful at least. And omniscient, presumably. Give them the benefit. The Republicans do.

Man, you can rationalize anything from there. As with God, so with Corps. Tripartite but indivisible. Unlimited power but no responsibility. Transcendent when it comes to, let's say, taxes. Above those. Undignified for a deity. Immanent on profits. Be there for that.

Cool. And a little kinky, this way of operating. Like to buy a kit for that on eBay. You say you can buy them at Capitol Goods and Trading, Penn Ave, D.C.? Contact my Representative? Lobbyist? All it takes is a load of cash but the returns are good.

Look at Heisenberg. Had to eliminate a few dudes on the way up, invest a sum, but the returns are mind blowing. And the shape-shifting comes in super handy. You're way enfranchised, tons of leverage, but no fingerprints. Stealth technology.

And other goodies. Came with the warship. Used. Klingon. A little worse for the wear from that last encounter with a worm hole, but fully functional. Cloak. And dagger. Fucking photon torpedoes. Got to have it. Tough world.

So the regulators come after your corporate ass, you morph into a person. Or a divinity. Or just waste their asses if they won't leave you alone. Out-gun 'em on the money front. Waste their asses with cash. Cool. Lee Atwater style. You just make shit up.

No wonder the Republicans kowtow to corporations, what with the religious bent. And the good returns, too. They love that. At least the ones high enough up in the food chain. May have to send them all off to Betty Ford on this one. Sounds a little funky. And addicting. And all sub rosa it is, too, with the stealth.

Anyway we're told this all somehow works out in the best interests of everybody, little guys included. Magically. Mysteriously. How? Shut up. You don't ask. It's a mystery, dummy.

They mean well, we're constantly reassured. Corporate kumbaya. Picture it. All these corporations--just bent the knee--sitting around a camp fire singing in the drizzle. They only let Fox News cover this in their program SPIN CYCLE, with host Bill the Shill, so we'll have to take his word. He swears they're beneficent, magnanimous, all that's good and holy, the corporations.

Ahem, the people. Those people. Them there. With the halos. The auras. Sitting around the fire with the embers glowing. Throwing another log--wait, shit, that's not wood. Those are our jobs being reduced to ashes.

The creationist crowd, they eat it up. It's all an article of faith with them anyway. They have special insight into the laws of the universe. So they think. So they believe. God's laws, which trump the heathen crap enacted by congress, fucking apostates.

So they're patriots, the creationists, their contempt for constitutional mechanisms notwithstanding. And the birthers. Remember it doesn't have to make sense. Good sign if it doesn't. Means you're in the realm of paradox. With the deity. All must be bent to His will. He, mark you. None of that She shit. A white He. Don't need no science. No reason. They got God.

And clearly since corporations are peeps--their peeps, mind--they can go to heaven. Probably predestined. Forgive me if I sound skeptical. Sounds like a big power grab and a lot of flimsy double-talk. They want us to take it all on faith, though. That's their idea.

No need. We ran an experiment on this, on ourselves, starting in the 70's, with the tax cuts for the rich and corporate welfare. Same thing really, those two. And more so in the 80's, the glory years of SS/RT. Supply Side, Rising Tide. Tide rose. Way up there. Small boats nowhere to be seen. They floated out to sea. Over to China.

But the people on the big boats, the corporatists, they rescued those people, some of them anyway, off the little boats. Out of their goodness. Saved their asses. Some of them. Gave them jobs. Good jobs, as servants. They're philanthropists, the corporatists. Points of light.

Those grateful people, the rescuees, are toiling away contentedly, they say, in the engine rooms and galleys. You never see them. It's said they look like ghosts. The government rewarded the big boat people for their good deed doing, and general holiness, with (more) money. From taxes paid by those little boat people under-decks. Got to come from somewhere.

Apart from being sick isn't this unsustainable? Isn't this system eating itself alive? I tried to point this out but they couldn't hear me, on the big boats. Huge party. Gatsby-style. No question about the outcome here, folks. Since the 70's the rich have done incredibly well. Everyone else, not so much.

This is the real Ponzi. Our tax dollars. They line their pockets, the corporatists, any way they can and give back as little as possible short of causing suspicion. They invest nothing, issuing false reports via their think tanks, Fox News, whatever. Why squander money on infrastructure for ingrates, those "takers," when you can buy another house, a bigger yacht. All kinds of great shit can be had, where the money flows.

There's a whole heirarchy, in the Ponzi. Leaders, Shills, Suckers. Appears to be in the late stages. They want more, they need more, since it's all going up in smoke to maintain their lifestyle.

But there's progressively less left to siphon off as the suckers become increasingly impoverished. The economic base? The jobs? What do you think the little boats were. And they're more and more irritated about their lives, the working folk, all the time. Might insurrect or something. They work harder while losing ground. Ultimately, inevitably, the system starves, collapses, comes unraveled, and everybody suffers.

OOPS! ERROR! They'll blame government of course. These aren't competitive entities, the big boat crowd. They're the takers, not the makers, despite the propaganda. They don't produce anything or benefit anyone. Just suck up resources. It's extractive.

Look at Mitt. Extracting wealth, like mining. Finding value, leaving skeletons of once viable industries. They're like snowballs rolling downhill. Accumulating stuff, running on inertia, until they come to a rest. As they must, inevitably.

Sure, they leave an occasional business or industry standing. If it suits their purposes. But the welfare of anyone else, or the country as a whole, doesn't factor in. It's irrelevant. And they ARE building infrastructure. Lots of it. In China.

Now look at basketball. Isn't that where you see the purest competition anywhere? Real competition. And football. And the national pastime, dogfighting. Let's say baseball. Privilege don't mean shit. Privilege gives you white boy basketball, circa 1950's. Dribble, dribble, tea break, shoot. Shake hands, pat the back.

Look now. What was that, fucking missile? Some black guy putting it down. Two points? Should get more than that. Looked like he came out of the rafters. You think the white boys want that on Wall Street? No way. Dribble, dribble, tea break, money rolling in, bushels and bushels. Shake hands, head home. Greenwich, their ghetto.

Good gig. I worked for that money! And they did. Kind of. Woke up at the top of a hill after a nice ride on the lift, took two steps forward, wiped the sweat from the brow, then whee! Just avoid the black guys clawing up-slope, on the way down. Would you give this up without a fight?

Anyway they regulate hell out of basketball. Order the owners around all over the place. Screaming socialists. The worst team gets first pick in the next draft, and so on. Total commies, but it keeps the whole system from imploding. In fact everybody does better. I mean everybody. And it makes for amazing competition. Real competition. Level playing field. No free rides to the top.

Somebody contact the SS/RT crowd and the libertarians. It's what they said they wanted. Freedom, latitude, to sink or swim. Structure enables this, it seems. Rational structure. Regulation. The kind only good, strong government can provide. Great discovery. Should instill the regulatory fervor. They're sure to get on board, when we show them.

But no, not what they really want, it turns out. Fair play? Rules? Limitations? Strictures? Instant replays? Game films? Independent analysts? Can't buy the refs? On Wall Street? No fucking way.

You can't hide shit. Not fair! Not fair! We paid a lot for the stealth! And that Klingon warship. What was that strange sound? Republican brains grinding their gears. Prime the photon torpedoes! Fire at will! Nuke something, anything! What good is a Swiss bank account in such a world. Horror.

One morning before I abandoned NPR in defense of my sanity, there was a report about a bust in Brooklyn. Prostitution. Mostly financial guys buying the services. Ten thousand dollars a night. That was the going rate. There's some free enterprise for you. Entrepreneurship. On both ends, I guess.

Then another report. The average net worth of a black person in the land of the free. Less than ten thousand dollars, if I remember right.

And here you thought I was exaggerating. I do sometimes, for effect. You never noticed? Hard to exaggerate these days when it comes to income disparity. And wealth disparity. And every kind of disparity.

I should mention Heisenberg here and the frankencorps and tie it all together somehow, but I've got to go to work. In the galleys, the engine room, of our wonderful floating plantation, plutocrat's paradise, yacht, Rovian Reichstag thingy. The big boat of the Boehnerites, with every imaginable amenity. Golf course, tanning beds, beer flowing in fountains, you name it.

You'll have to do it for me. Tie it in. Be creative. But keep your head down. Helmet. Flak jacket. Maybe body armor. Impenetrable force field.

Remember, they have drones. And the photons. Someone drops a dime, you're toast. Run a missile up your ass. Cruz missile. Photon your ass. Might want to invest in an igloo of concrete and steel, or a bunker. Cloaking would be good.

Heisenberg and his type, they don't mess around. Beam me out of here, somebody.