We're Better

Fuck you, you Lords and Ladies. I soothe myself sometimes with British drama. Okay, okay, it's a choice I make for the visual pleasure of it but, my God, there are people in those shows whose lives are extraordinarily significant and those whose lives are nothing at all. Evidently the lower classes buy into it for whatever perverse reasons. Fuck them all. 

It disgusts me, the idea that there are better and lesser people by birth, and the creation of subclasses of humanity. All this is reinforced in all kinds of formal, above-board ways and in more insidious and entrenched ways by inertia and by the weight of tradition. Why would we welcome this horrible practice into America? We've been a refuge from it for so long. 

But look at how wealth in America accumulates at the top for no reason at all. Nothing to do with innate worth or merit or productivity, anyway. It's impossible for anyone to be that productive, so much so that they have the kind of money these people have. Let them be rewarded, sure, and well enough, but wasn't that already the case, before the 1980's?

When, it was, that Republican economic policy took hold and the rest is misery. There is no doubt that the bad policy caused the extreme concentrations of wealth and that it continues through lies and deceit and strong-armed political tactics, systematically disenfranchising hard-working and loyal Americans, who live responsible lives and really fight the wars. 

We are the United States no longer. Fuck you, too, to the Republicans who have caused this. I hope someday they pay, though it may only be that they are eventually seen for what they are, greedy scoundrels and crooks, and betrayers of the true American traditions of decency and democracy and fair play.

Gods and Monsters

I've just read something on Edward Snowden and I have an opinion about him. I don't know much about it so this is a wide-angle, soft-focus view. To me he is a hero. What he did can't be said to be generically right, as a form of behavior, but in this instance it was right.

It doesn't matter what he intended or if he's a good person or has a big ego or what. At root it all has to do with nukes, no doubt, weaponry that is a totalitarian's dream, a great equalizer. The United States has struggled in trying to come to terms with the nukes.

They are major military mojo. And a paranoid's best friend. Our country was designed to be administratively inefficient, to protect us from totalitarianism, so there's a natural tension. We can level the field by becoming more totalitarian, with respect to the Russians.

Or whomever, and that's a big whomever because the people who developed a taste for fear or got overly attached to it out of familiarity are going to want fear and a focus for it, and with nukes that's easy, though "Islamo-fascism" is catchy and may stick around.

And someone just made it up. Anyway, let's suppose that America has gone somewhat totalitarian out of neurosis over the nukes and other threats, real and invented, and that Snowden is anti-totalitarian--not the man, necessarily, but what he represents.

I think this is the case. And let's look at the fear supposedly justifying things. Do nukes really change everything? I don't think so. Annihilation is annihilation, once or ten times over. One of life's greatest challenges is to put yourself in another's shoes and situation, historically.

When has annihilation not been a threat? It wasn't so long ago that people didn't know to look for rational explanations for things. You start with this, reason, one would think. Once it was all ascribed to gods and monsters to help with the fear. Now consider James Inhofe.

We have a guy in charge of a Senate committee on the environment who believes in causal explanations having to do with gods, and similar people in all kinds of positions of power in Washington and remember, we have nukes, and now no allegiance to reason. 

Oh, 9/11: fear-motivated people were in charge then, anti-rationalists and true believers. The USA as we knew it ceased to exist. It was never a perfect country but damn good in some respects and there were those who loved it in a grownup way, accepting its flaws.

Snowden is the antidote to this, the work of a fear-mongering coterie, our totalitarians. If they weren't justified then Snowden is. I won't fault him. But those other guys, the lovers of fear, have a lot to answer for, as Snowden has shown. And read about ABLE ARCHER '83.

In Wikipedia or wherever, when you have a chance, if you think it doesn't matter. See where the irrational guys can get you when they decide to have some fun and play war games. They almost got us all killed, all the while swearing that they are wise and militarily competent.

Flat-Earthers

What sense does it make to judge a society on how well it takes care of people who don't need taking care of? It's not much of a standard. It's the standard of the flat-earthers, those who deny reality out of fear or stupidity or greed or the need to submit to authority, to dehumanize themselves because they can't handle the responsibility of their own freedom. 

Hail the Conquering Heroes

How did the Kochenlocher boys get so rich? It's all kind of fuzzy. They went to a party, a sendoff for the poor slobs in the workingman's trenches, and woke up insanely wealthy and without a clear memory of how it happened. So they say. The working people may have had something to do with it, you would think, since that kind of money doesn't come out of nowhere, but those workers may get uppity and start demanding a share of the wealth so the money will be declared illegitimate.

Fatherless, and outside the realm of normal human causation, that is. Legitimate as hell on the Kochenlocher end, of course. I mean, what would you do but try to hang on to it in every way possible? And marry, ally yourself and legitimize the cash. Give it a daddy. A libertarian daddy. This is how you reverse-engineer the whole thing, you declare the creation of wealth to be the work of heroic individuals, the Norse gods of big business, excluding everyone else and social systems and infrastructure and so on.

Your think tanks put out memoranda to the effect of your greatness and how your golden touch made all that money in spite of the horrible, lazy working scum trying to hold you back and the hideous feds, memoranda replete with stats and figures and graphs and all kinds of fancy rationalization. There is no social aspect to the creation of that wealth at all, they say. It was a miracle, the miracle of J.P. Morgan's Creek, dwarfing the Loaves and Fishes incident. They are gods, ascended masters. Regard them with awe.

And leave them alone, it is recommended, for God's sake, and for your own good. Somehow, they reassure us, it all works out better that way, even for those whose jobs went away and who didn't come out of that last, libertarian-engineered economic crash intact. We must believe: they are heroes. We must trust them because we need heroes and they're plausible heroes, no matter how all the work actually got done and how many innocent people were hurt or neglected as the Kochenlochers made more and more money. 

Psycho Disaster

Who identifies with some nonentity who gets annihilated as a trivial thing in a violent movie? Nobody does but that was a person, too. Not really, but you know what I mean. Annihilation is something that happens to someone else, especially in a trivial scene or as one of a horde of people obliterated. This is the point of civilization.

Someone could walk up and shoot you but they don't, usually, because we have rules about that. Standards. Laws and regulations. How different is it to have similar rules in the worlds of business and finance? But, no, we can't have that. Why? Because certain persons have the equivalent of assault weapons and others have nothing.

Guess who wants to keep it that way. Financialization is dehumanization. It makes some people, arbitrarily, into nonentities, like some helot slaughtered in a film, the human equivalent of a packing peanut. So, when you go to see the new Mad Max movie, identify with all those slaughtered nonentities. Clearly they were not chosen.

They were not the elect, not preordained for salvation. The financial types must have been preordained for multiple money orgasm. The chosen choose themselves and then brazen it out from there, hoping they don't bite off too much and get caught at the chicanery. They think they've won but can't comprehend that some people don't care.

That it's not an issue for them, who's on top. Until, that is, the psychos take over and they get so hammered they have to act, meaning they are subjected to the financial version of someone walking up and shooting them. Has this not happened? It has, again and again. The sick thinking of Calvinism, the fatalism, determinism and resignation, is pervasive. 

People are persuaded that you get what you deserve and that it's inevitable. The winners foist this on those with hardship who, in fact, enable the rich to get rich, in many ways but notably by not shooting them. Deprivation is a slow form of slaughter. There is no freedom in insecurity. It causes fear and resentment but it's a big part of the New Jerusalem.

The New Jerusalem of the money men, that is, their well-rationalized society of unilateral predation, where they have their own set of rules and hope to hell against fair-play and the civilizing effects of regulation, real competition, without the leg-up they so love.

More, the Moving Target

Another aspect of narcissism is the culture of "more." Do you see the connection? A self lacks definition and so seeks definition through acquisition, as a way of saying "look at this shit, it's what I am." But the acquisitors are also trying to see themselves in the stuff, to get reassurance that they are the person they think they are or hope to be.

Of course it never works. The self has to have some kind of existence independently of the stuff or the stuff could as easily be said to be looking at the self, which is circular, the stuff reflecting on the self and the self on the stuff. There's no static point of reference, just interdependence, and the stuff is tainted by association with the insecure self. 

What did Groucho say about not wanting to belong to any club that would have him? So the insecure self can never be reassured, since it is looking for reassurance in the wrong place. And it has to always have "more" in an attempt to fill up something that is losing ground out the other end because the acquired stuff loses its power and becomes diminished.

The circle must be broken.

Running for the Exits

Occasionally I make the mistake of clicking on a video on YouTube with a title such as: "O'Reilly Gets His Ass Handed to Him." Usually I only watch music videos. The striking thing, besides the not-so-latent aggression and bogus indignation of Bill, is the belief in the rightness of America no matter how we behave. America must be right: always, everywhere, and irrespective of what we do. 

Love it or leave it. But in this virtual world of ours we know who is heading for the exits. You can head for the exits as though it's a video game and over time through technology because your financial self is a kind of avatar. Corporations are people. People are corporations, limited liability entities, with the ability to cross borders in all kinds of inventive ways. The motivation: to avoid taxation.

These self-proclaimed patriots don't think they have any responsibility at all to the society that made it possible. They think the society is the beneficiary and should be grateful that they deign to live here. Well, pardon me. Excuse me for my existence, for interfering with their money-lust, but I think they are the beneficiaries, as Franklin Roosevelt stated as though it were so obvious it couldn't be argued. 

Those who benefit the most are more responsible, in every way. Let me look at my crystal ball. I'm back. The crystal says that if we do the inconceivable, raise taxes to the levels of the fifties and sixties, let's say, when America was in fact great, when we made stuff and acted reasonably intelligently as a nation, O'Reilly and his clan will clog the exits, their virtual, financial selves and maybe bodily.

Be gone. "We the People" will live on and be better off without you.

The Mathical Month-Man

This is a story about what happens when people become part of an equation and hidden assumptions are forgotten or abandoned. Assumptions, I mean, about why productivity matters, why waste is bad, and what we are doing when we work and strive for something.

Work doesn't mean anything if it doesn't relate somehow to human welfare. Otherwise it doesn't matter. It fact it's obscene if all the intelligence and effort and expenditure of resources fail to result in more happiness for more people. That's where we are, though.

We're blowing resources and working our asses off and making rich people richer and nothing else, all to comply with a sick psychology and we're all implicated. All of us, that is, living in the USA.  We need help but of course we think we're better than everyone else. 

That's how it works. Crazy people don't think they're crazy, they think they're right. Normal people don't worry about being right, they want to be happy. Instead of humanizing economics and politics and all the sciences and education we quantify and objectify people. 

We make them into things. I propose that we consider the life of a person, for a month, in reasonably pleasant and satisfying circumstances. It has value and not only for that person. And yet this "month-man" becomes mathematized so that it has no weight. No value. 

There is human suffering underlying all the statistics and lots of confusion. People are frightened and don't understand what has happened. What's happened is that they have been systematically thwarted and disenfranchised, not by conspiracy but by common interest. 

The common interest and application of people who care only about themselves, clearly. I think it will all end in more suffering, the kind of suffering we have brought to other people with our greed, our compulsions, our demand for oil, our demand for drugs and for more stuff.

It has to stop.

Cristo, el Verdadero Amigo

Cristo, el Verdadero Amigo: I saw this on the back of a van and felt the warmth well up in my heart, in a way I never could have in reaction to any of the English translations I can come up with. I hate to think of anyone without a verdadero amigo. It may as well be Cristo. Cristo will not let you down. 

Everyone else can, by dying on you, if in no other way. Maybe in Spanish it's trite to native speakers, I don't know, but the only languages I've begun to learn well enough to sense the nuances in were ancient ones. I could do better in those than in English in getting new understanding and insight.

Take "arête." As a translation "excellence" doesn't cut it. It's an entire concept of culture and appropriateness. Evidently "simpatico" works in that way, comprising an ill-defined world of meaning which is, at the same time, entirely clear in it's fuzziness, being in the realm almost of harmonics.

English to me is so screwed up in this respect: so many words are too concrete and commercialized to be useful. I think English can rock in the macrocosm of writing. It's an incredibly rich language in it's scope, with so many innovations and introductions from interesting places.

And there are multiple strains of Latinate and Romance stuff, roots, particles and words, on top of the Germanic base. Though it's a great language there are problems at the atomic level. "Virtue." That's another reasonable translation of "arête," but it sounds like a whole lot of un-fun.

It also doesn't begin to capture the idea. Let's say we stick with "arête" for now. It's a word in English as well or should be.  I don't think he came up with it but E. F. Schumacher wrote about convergent and divergent problems and the corresponding kinds of thinking needed to address them. 

My fear is that American English has gone all convergent. We want answers, solutions without trade-offs, because we define everything worth having in terms of control and productivity, so it's all about solving problems and durable goods. Fine, but try to show the value of el Verdadero Amigo.

In that arena, or the value of arête. It's pointless. Must everything have an obvious point? For me it's what's worth worrying about, all the divergent things, where there are trade-offs and uncertainties and indescribable aesthetic joys and where there's room for the truth of human inadequacy.

A linguist once told me that to be funny something had to be un-captured by language, somehow elusive of it, so the convergent world of capture and containment is also humorless. Soulless. The convergent world is important. You want bridges not to fall down but soul matters as well.

Even if you can never properly define it or put your finger on it, because it's soul that gets you to sympathy and kindness and, one hopes, perhaps, to el verdadero amigo, the true friend, or maybe true friendship, where one can be simpatico in the world, with happiness and with humor.

Predation

Many people have written on the core difference between conservatives and progressives in America since the beginning of the extreme polarization, which I date to 1994, when Newt Gingrich and his horrible crowd of self-righteous, religious conservatives showed up in Washington. The things I have seen talk about authority and the need for certainty. 

Conservatives love authority and need certainty. The problem is that this is me. I like authority and believe in certainty, that there is truth or true things. I think that authority and truth are always there, that a belief in anarchy is a belief in anarchist authority, for example, and that truth is a matter of belief and that you couldn't get out of bed without it.

A real belief in chaos and meaninglessness would result in the disintegration of one's psyche. So what's up with the Gingrichers? They are not real conservatives. What they believe in is predation. Even this may have validity but they believe in biased predation, a situation in which they can't lose, so you see the roots of this in two things: slavery and inheritance.

The white Southerners in the coalition believe in predation with the situation hopelessly fixed in their favor. The wealthy believe in the same thing. Predation is great as long as they can't lose and the power can't be turned against them. Speaking from the point of view of the prey, this is not fair. If they want a death fight, okay, let's give it back. 

Let the bullies be bullied. They scream and squawk whenever there's a hint of this, as bullies always do, because they are cowards. They never realize the consequences of the system they adhere to, at least the negative ones. They dump all that on us. Enough, I say.

The Make a Pass Foundation

With more and more Americans on the ropes and worse to come, as the baby-boomers retire in increasing numbers and Republicans salivate over their social security funds, the points of light are finally kicking in, with echoes of the feeble efforts of Methodists and others in Victorian London. Bah. Humbug. There's the Take a Piss Foundation, for Republicans of a certain temperament.

And Say a Little Prayer, for those of a religious disposition. The most popular has turned out to be Make a Pass, no doubt due to the American love of sports and betting. Mind you, none of these are funded in an ongoing way, but are modeled on lotteries and are educational, helping people to see that they are in trouble because they are unworthy and because God hates them.

No matter what some people seem to think it says in the Bible, about the rich and the poor. Make a Pass is a betting operation, the idea being that, once you see clearly you are going to fail, a "Hail, Mary," as they call it, is not only a good idea but the best option. You can't go negatively bust. Bankrupt by $100,000 is the same as bankrupt by $10,000, so it makes sense to gamble.

Though it is said Republicans will tip you if you find their monogrammed golf balls three fairways over from the hole they were supposed to be on, if you want to try that in order to stay solvent. Ball boy! The secretive umbrella group over all of these is the Ronnie and Nancy Reagan Foundation for Keeping Gov'ment Off Our Backs, technically a think tank.

Republicans love think tanks. There are social subgroups within the organization, Tee Me Up and Tea Me Up, for men and women respectively. This is where the hard work and heavy lifting of privilege occurs. There is no real hard work, of course. That's the point of privilege, but justifications must be maintained for the extraordinary perversity of the entire system.

Stupid Democrats

Finally I think I've come to rest somewhere, in this writing project. I often write things I don't post for one reason or another. I wrote something on the massive narcissism of Hillary Clinton and it made me think of the narcissism of Democrats in general and their amazing incompetence. It's all about them. Their journey, their job, their position or whatever. 

Their brilliant careers. Truly, we are ravaging the world with our greed but it's still all about women or gay people or blacks or whatever damn group the Democrats are carrying on about in order to feel good about themselves, basking in that warm sun of self-righteousness. And they are right, for fuck's sake, in comparison with the Republicans.

But that standard has gone so far down it's not recognizably even human. Still the Democrats can't snap out of it. Then it occurred to me that it's not from a failure to recognize the primordial actuality of the rights of other people, by dealing always in classes and categories and such, thereby turning them into abstractions, but a personal failure.

I mean really personal. These extreme narcissists like the Clintons are abstractions to themselves. They are defined in their own minds by circumstantial shit. They are unknown to themselves. From this comes the drive and the boundless neediness. They have failed to meet a precondition for respecting the rights of others, respecting themselves. 

Their selves are amorphous, feckless, futile and fleeting. Ghost selves. Their personalities are shadows and projections, not real things but images of something else, attributes in search of a point of reference, a real thing to which to refer, an actual self. There's nothing there, perhaps as a consequence of living in a culture of luxury, a cult of consumption.

The upshot is that we are irredeemably screwed. These shadow personalities are active and productive in their own right but simply inhuman and compromised by the most primal conflict of interest there is, selfishness, the impossibility of acting out of anything other than need. Ideally people can extend family feeling to all of mankind and creation. 

By extension of respect for themselves and their families, but none of that is possible. It's all tainted by narcissism. The EMILY'S LIST gang can see only, oh, my goodness, a girl president! A girl who can't get elected and who couldn't get the job done if she did, because it's not about getting the job done. How many of these people have ever mowed a lawn. 

If that mattered they would support Elizabeth Warren. Who happens to be a woman and, incidentally, someone who can get the job done, who is willing to say "this is insane" in the face of manifest insanity. Not the Clintons. Incidentals are now essentials and essentials nowhere to be seen, so the end point of everything is a shot of gratification. 

It will never end because it is the end, their purpose and conviction, in some warped sense of the word.

Let Them Eat

Marie Antoinette famously didn't say "let them eat cake" but the spirit of it is well understood. It is: "I'm wallowing in it. Screw you." In honor of NATIONAL REPUBLICAN DAY, which I've just invented, let's all indulge in this innocent and honest game, good for the whole family: to start with "let them eat" and fill it in with all kinds of crazy, fun stuff.

"Braggadocio," for example, or "foetid turds," as in "let them eat foetid turds!" Think of the vocabulary-building potential for the little ones. Dad can begin with "let them eat..." and then, looking out wryly on the brood bouncing up and down in nervous excitement, choose the lucky young'un. This is innocent, fun and instructive, all in one. Let it begin! 

Monkey Gone to Hell

There is no determinism. Nothing is written. By God, that is. We write it ourselves. We write our own history.

We create our own world.

Heaven is us. Hell is us. It's a choice we make. I'll prove freewill by writing "this." This. "That." That. "Snarfawunkle."

Snarfawunkle.

Do you want hell? Fine, go to hell, but don't take me with you.

I want heaven.

Corn Flakes

I can't eat corn flakes because I always want the last bite to be the best and it's the soggiest and the worst. I'll pour a little more in the bowl craving the crispness, repeatedly, until I give up, feeling full and foolish and not very good generally. 

This must be the problem with addiction. You want the purity and excellence of the first experience and you can never get it back, but you keep trying. Addiction is horrifying but its cousin, self-indulgence, is fun. Self-indulgent people are fun. 

That capacity for simple enjoyment, without vanity or an invidious element, is as human as it gets. It grounds us in life and, please God, I'll take all that kind of simple grounding I can. I was taught to alleviate suffering wherever possible.

I have no problem beginning with myself. Having been raised a good Catholic I am probably overly aware of my faults, a strange form of egotism, but I say this for myself: when I find a good thing I want everyone to have it. I'm a born sharer. 

May you and everyone have as much simple pleasure and as little pain and addiction as possible. It's my wish and it's not even Christmas but, what the hell, that's my mood.   

It Doesn't Flush

When I was building my house I bought the most standard toilet imaginable, a big brand and the equivalent of a Chevy Impala or maybe a Nova, not a Chevette or Corvette and certainly not a Vega, God help us. Those things self-destructed. 

It doesn't flush. I was amazed and looked at Consumer Reports after the fact and they said: it doesn't flush. I thought it was me but, no, I had verification. You know how you can't help but think that God hates you if you hit a long string of red lights? 

This is my red-light toilet. I know it's nothing and meaningless and that millions of other people bought the same model but I still felt picked on and done-wrong, hated by God and generally wretched in the awareness of my trusting stupidity.

And all this over a toilet.

Note to Self: Get a Grip

The news fast is no longer a new toy and I'm back to having trouble with composure. I've had to drive to Raleigh twice lately, which takes me near a huge mall and it's like a sub-planet with serious gravitational pull. You feel it near you and, with the intensity of the traffic, suspect you could get stuck in a lane and end up there against your will.

On the roads there are a lot of people white-knuckling their way to consumer nirvana, with all the windows on the cars rolled up even on a beautiful day. It has an outer-space aspect to it. Also I've taken on a job in a gated, golf community and it has an inter-planetary feel. There may be a solar system, galaxy or parallel universe in which these things make sense.

They don't on Earth. You wonder, if you could measure happiness by the levels of certain hormones, if we're better off than aborigines. A few times in my life I've been somewhere so dark the night-sky looked like black construction paper with crazy-salt scattered on it. It doesn't get any better on a beautiful, clear night. It's an experience of awe.

And it carries with it a sense of your own smallness, which is liberating because your problems and worries become small. I've always felt at-home in the presence of grandeur. That's what I'm looking for, that perspective, which for me is true and harder to come by lately. Mankind has won an imaginary battle with nature too well for its own good.

I know what it's like to want to shoot deer because they're eating my lunch but we're way past that, competing with other species for resources. I don't know what to do but I'll start by re-reading some Willa Cather. She always helped me with perspective. There's something about her outlook, maybe having to do with her origins on the amazing American plains.

A place where the beauty of the sky can blanket you, day or night. I'll pull THE PROFESSOR'S HOUSE off the shelves, which I remember the most vividly of her books. And I may read some history. I recall being told that all of recorded human history was a flash and I understand it now, thinking of perspective. It's been a party which will end. 

We hope voluntarily and in a controlled way and without a terrible aftermath, but we'll see.

Cruel Girl

Vickie. The name makes me reach out to steady myself. She was a girl I knew, beginning maybe in fifth grade. She had a talent for cruelty. Maybe a genius.

That was Vickie. She changed lives. She changed mine. She seemed to mark a new era in a large family, pre-Vickie and post. They were a nice family, once.

But after Vickie had her way they would knock you down and take you out, find a weak spot and slash away at it. They would remember every humiliation.

You would be reminded of every defeat. And, man, the look of pleasure in her eyes, the celebratory glee, when she'd caused harm. Insiders were rewarded.

Outsiders punished. It was like a little mafia. If you were outside you wanted to be out of range, to be safe. Even the mother participated. I was surprised.

I thought parents were above that. This is not the sort of thing you tell people all over the place. Why would you? I've told only one person. Was Vickie a prodigy?

You have no idea, as a kid, what's normal and not. I assumed normal. My confidant was stunned at the specifics of the sorts of things Vickie said, pointing at prodigy.

I had been friends with the family. I was an insider for a time and then not, but I knew my sister had suffered horribly from some attacks at school. It was Vickie.

And here I became an insider, unwittingly adding to her hurt. I think all this just happens. There are brilliantly cruel people. They strengthen some people.

They destroy others. Which am I? I don't know.

I Want to be a Genius

They say you can't throw a rock in New York City without hitting a Jewish genius or two, but my peeps are associated with drunkenness and volubility. I'm not a drunk and--oh, damn, I may be a bit voluble. I may have to stipulate to that. Anyway, for better or worse, identification is an important part of everything. I'm a confirmed anti-utopian.

According to the principles of which you embrace the weirdness, imperfection, error and inadequacy of your being. And identification, as in "identity movements," can be bad stuff but everything in moderation, that's my motto, and everyone should have groups they identify with that help them to innocently feel good about themselves.

It's a freebie, as long as there's no persecution of other groups. Even exclusion is okay, again in moderation, as long as everyone has a way to belong and be enfranchised and be happy and have a good life. A humane society makes it easy for people to feel good about themselves, through identification and other means.

It helps you own your imperfection. Maybe I need to give up on the genius thing, but it has such a nice ring. I don't go to church. "Episcopalian." No, I don't think so. The Elks and Moose are still out there, aren't they? I'll get me to a lodge. Be a Moose. It amazes and embarrasses me, but I just remembered: that was a nickname I once had, as a child.

"Moose." Oh, man, this hasn't gone off in a good direction. From aspirations of genius to moose.

Idolatry, Superstition and Fetishism

You hear a word like "idolatry" and it has a reserved spot in the parking garage in your head. It slips right in and it has nothing to do with you. It's not your spot and probably not in your building. This is one of the intangible elements of privilege. Privileged people don't have the cause to doubt themselves. Not the way other people do.

Because they have won. Life has judged them right by the outcome. If this has the ring of something other than honest self-assessment I'm with you, but it's natural as hell. Let's say someone is one of the few survivors in an accident and they know, more than anybody, that it was nothing but luck. It still has cachet. They appear special and chosen.

Here's the point: I think those "chosen" persons know better than the outsiders that it's invented. It's a question of where they go from there, acceptance and admission or denial and defensiveness. But they know, at least in a crevice in their consciousness. It's superstition to think otherwise: invented, metaphysical causation.

I think I remember Cary Grant and Jimmy Stewart being interviewed, and others of their generation, and saying that they had been unbelievably fortunate. They recognized that, whatever else, the opportunity had to be there and that luck was involved, but they were incredibly talented. They can afford the admission, but not our guys.

Our guys, the new privileged class, know somewhere down deep how utterly unworthy they are. That's why they're so defensive, but we're accomplices and responsible as well because privilege can only apply to a minority or it becomes the norm. If a majority of people survive an accident there's no cachet. They weren't chosen.

A majority has to buy into it or it doesn't work. This is the link with birtherism, climate-denial and creationism, all forms of invented causality or the denial of actual causality--not of an instance of causality but causality, period. They are in a full flight from and fight against reality and end up in idolatry, superstition and fetishism.

Time (The Revelator, My Ass)

I'm impatient. I wish I were a person of faith but I'm not--I'm probably in the twentieth percentile on that. I don't want to wait for the second coming or the advent of another British satire group the caliber of Monty Python to expose the infernal and dastardly doings of those Snidely Whiplash-like right wingers and their schemes.

I want it now.

Rejoice!

Republicans have found a cure for baldness and an antidote for anthrax: tax cuts for the rich. You can bet your retirement on it. You already did. They bet it for you.

Munchkin-proof

There's a largish community garden on my property. Initially I had put up a shade-house for plants diagonally across the field near the far corner of the place, where there's another gate on another private road, still in my subdivision. In effect I have a big corner lot, fenced, at about ten acres. Once the infrastructure was in place for the shade-house it was nothing to add a garden and I hope eventually to grow something I can sell.

Meanwhile I'm trying to learn things by offering garden space to others, ostensibly in return for produce, but really to get things up-and-running and to learn about what to grow and how to grow it. There are munchkins there, little people, and they came with the mothers who have been running the garden. Last year it was a fortyish mom with two little girls, one of whom fell in love with a garden cart and pulled it around beamingly.

This year there are two single moms, so far, in their late thirties, with a little girl each. They're so cute sometimes it just kills you. I mean the kids. The other day there were three of them including a friend in a kiddie pool screaming with pleasure and splashing around. The older girls were aiming the hose at the littlest one and she would shriek standing there in her pudgy nakedness every time their aim came near. You can't not be affected.

My connection is not very close but you really ache for them to have good lives. I can't imagine what it's like for their mothers. I'll ask them. We're friendly and they also use the sauna up at the house occasionally and run around naked--I'm the envy of my acquaintances--so I'll engage them on it when they're all relaxed and mellowed after the sauna. I'll employ alcohol as well, if I need to, to get good information. I want to understand.

You must love them so much it makes you crazy. And it is such an uncertain world. Anyway I'll need to munchkin-proof the area around the garden to make sure there are no injuries. And the house and environs, where they come to use the outdoor bathroom. I want to munchkin-proof the country and the world for them. It's not my job but I'll try. It's somebody's job and if we can't give our kids a fair start in life we have failed.

Who knows if it will take hold but we need politics with a munchkin-proofing platform or at least a plank. I turn it over to you. I have gardening to do.

ADDENDUM: I will also munchkin-proof my mouth. I had quickly forgotten how you have to be careful what you say in front of a kid because you can't always reason it backwards. You can mention something and, wham, the kid instantly wants it and it's that or agony. It's so interesting. 

I love to see how, when and to what extent kids pick up on irony, the layering effect. It's early. Kids are amazing. Such little sponges.

Name Your Gods

Some years ago I started to talk more openly to working people about their jobs. It was as I expected. They were being hammered and screwed, and further up in the system than I anticipated. A UPS driver told me they had taken everything away from him they could and that the new hires were getting nothing. I talked to guys working for a once locally-owned lawn care company which had been bought by a big national operation.

They were treated like slaves, with an MBA cracking the whip over them daily. Their jobs were in immediate peril if they didn't bring in the cash. If you think this is necessary you're wrong. It's a choice we made by electing Republicans, who will predictably cut taxes on the wealthy, deregulate everything, throw money at defense and destroy social services. Their subtle rules changes over time favored consolidation of capital.

And when they openly swing for the fences we get something like CITIZENS UNITED. Cutting taxes on wealthy people encourages them not to create jobs. With high marginal tax rates they will start and invest in businesses so as not to pay taxes on the money. I have a small business. I am way more likely to spend money on the business than on myself. It's pre-tax money. And the people who most hate regulation are crooks. 

Regulations are rules which promote fair play and efficiency and help capture social costs. Deregulate baseball. The rich teams go on a roll and the sport implodes. This is the Republican model, boom and bust. On defense theirs is a Maginot approach, with feel-good militarization operating at the level of common sense of human sacrifice, which is what it entails when activated, an offering to their gods of war in propitiation. 

Or maybe other gods. Ask your Republican representatives which gods, exactly, and also which gods it is who hate feeding children. I want names. The names of their gods who love the rich and despise everyone else. The names of their gods who love war and hate peace. The names of their gods who live in gated communities and play golf and whose well-paid lawyers wipe their corporate asses when they shit themselves. 

Behold, maybe these are their gods, the lawyer-nanny gods of inherited wealth and easy money and privilege, or any gods who reassure them that they are worthy, and better than us, and that lower golf scores are possible. Their gods are lesser than themselves. Their gods are their servants. They are their own gods, in a way. This is not what I was brought up with but, hey, it's a new dawn and their new day.

Claire's Motto

Less Drama, More Sauna

Plant a Tree On Me

Why anyone would want to be buried in anything other than a pine box, I don't know. Let 'em eat me, the critters and microbes, that's what I say, and plant a tree on me, with maybe a wooden cross which will last long enough that they won't accidentally dig me up with an excavator or run a ditch witch through me while I have flesh on the bone.

Then nothing. That seems to me the most honest expression of our existence. We do live on for a while, viscerally, through those who have known us, and then that's it. We are no more, without preservation, and I don't want to be hermetically sealed in anything. Let 'em eat me, I repeat, before I get this notarized for the benefit of my heirs.

Lies The Koch Boys Told Me

What with the Koch brothers and others weighing in on education, making sure that there is cannon fodder aplenty for them and another generation of Republican automatons, it's only fair that the other side have a say. Part of the curriculum, starting in high school, should involve foreign entanglements and domestic subterfuge, a messy web of good drama.

All that is needed is a few passive swipes at cronyism and its consequences and the seeds of rational, national self-criticism will be sown. The consequences, that is, of American foreign and domestic policy. I say passive because I mean viewing a movie or two and a show or two, from respected sources:

     The FRONTLINE episode on the Iraq war

     THE SMARTEST GUYS IN THE ROOM, a film on ENRON

     CAPITOL CRIMES, a Bill Moyers' piece on Jack Abramoff 

     BOOGIE MAN, a film on Lee Atwater

Here we have a primer on American, ahem, Republican, incompetence, malfeasance and skullduggery. There should also be something on their economic theories, perhaps focusing on Phil and Wendy Gramm, and how rampant deregulation trashed the world economy. WE DESTROY THE WORLD AND EAT A STEAK, maybe. I'll make this one, all fair and balanced. 

Something on FOX NEWS would be good, now that I think of it, and maybe on the coup--pardon--election, of 2000, but I'm getting carried away. How Koch-esque. They only want to rule the world. I'm trying to get through my life in reasonable shape, and see that others can do the same, not like those poor Americans who came back from the Middle East in pieces.

Courtesy of the Kochs and their cohorts and their excellence in starting and managing wars. How will the Koch boys explain all that in their schools? And they somehow came out of the mess richer still, as with every mess they make. Quelle surprise! Aye, another movie springs to mind, waiting to be made, THE EMPIRE LASHES OUT. Anyone want to take this one on?

Men For Any Season

There's a part of me which can't believe I'll ever be hungry again after a big meal. This is so fundamental to being whatever it is that we are. Abstractly we know, of course, we'll be hungry again but what is abstraction? There's an elemental truth to satiety or hunger or desire. An abstraction can't have this because it's untranslatable, the elemental thing. No one else feels it.

This doesn't absolve abstractions from the need to be rooted in reality. Quite the opposite because, well, they can be unrooted. Visceral experience can't. Accepting the reality and validity of the visceral experiences of others has something to do with conscience, I'll bet. It may be conscience for what I know because it means accepting the existence and rights of others.

Where the hell are we without that? A world without conscience. And people are fascinated with this because they lack the direct experience of it or fail to understand it abstractly. I'm willing to say it's something you do not want to fuck with. Regard it with revulsion. It means multiple realities, no accountability and open-season on everyone, including your own self.

Imagine that. The bell tolls for all of us and always. Any mention of end times in the Bible is about this: your life is always ending. The second coming is always happening and the Four Horsemen are at the door. Welcome them in. We are always our own apocalypse. It is now. So, anyway, enjoy your day. Really. It's one fewer of a limited number. I will try myself. 

Construe that as you will. I meant to write on Rand Paul and people who can morph into anything at will and to suit their ambition but I've lost interest in it. I don't have the heart for it. No cudgel in my quiver today. Away I go now to have as good a day as I can. May you have as good a day as possible as well.

This Is Me Getting My Ass Kicked...

Me at Krakatoa mid-eruption. Me on the beach with the tsunami coming in. Me at Chernobyl catching some rays. Me being pissed on by Republicans. 

Where do you draw the line between unavoidable catastrophes and man-made destruction? It's all gone fuzzy. There's man-made as in individually, and man-made collectively. Man-made as in planned and intended and man-made as in unintended, or collateral, damage.

Unconsciousness is a hard thing to get your head around. And unconscious intent, wanting something and not knowing you want it. I've been there, though it wasn't so much unconscious as a shadow personality you want to get rid of but can't, semi-integrated with your "real" self. 

My shadow self wanted to suffer, to go through some wrenching experience and come out the other side shot of grief. I wanted it to be the way it used to be, before a sense of loss became a part of my life. Firstly, you can't get there. You are already changed forever.

Secondly, you don't want to get there. You are, potentially at least, a better person because of it: more compassionate, kind and emotionally complex. How does all this play out in a collective sense? I don't know. But I'll bet a bundle there's a collective, repressive unconscious. 

Not archetypal stuff but a level or two up from that, a shared version of what I just described, a group of people in flight from themselves, irresponsible corporate actors. What would it look like if there were a doppleganger version of Disney World based on Dick Cheney's psyche?

Shudder. The thing that has changed is this, simply and undeniably: our ability to destroy stuff, meaning we can now wreck the whole world. We aren't programmed for this possibility. We are programmed for the power version of a budget constraint which isn't there.

Not anymore. We are way too powerful for our own good, strange as that sounds. This is the objective, to integrate that awareness into our collective consciousness and have it play out in our behavior. The whole of humanity needs to go in for analysis. I know, I know. 

Dick won't have it, but couldn't we try? We bring our kids up with Disney World and then shunt them off into Cheneyland. If Cheneyland is our dark side, so be it, but we need to own it and integrate it or it'll be some petty tyrant running things from behind the curtain. 

Back with the curtain, Toto! The Dicks of the world must have their due.

I Love Apricots

One of the great things about getting older is that you figure out who you are and what you like and don't like. It involves the occasional hit to one's vanity, as it did for me when a friend shot back at me once "you're such a worrier." It hurt but I new instantly he was right. The worrying became less of a problem after that.

The first thing I ask in such instances is whether it's circumstantial or constitutional. Sometimes you don't know. The worrying for me is circumstantial but so old and deep it's effectively constitutional. Whatever the case it's reassuring when you acknowledge the truth of something. 

There's good and there's bad but not so much perversity and inauthenticity.

...

The Imploding Naugahyde Noninevitable

The great shame about our self-destruction is how unnecessary it is. We're swimming in resources. We've won it all and yet we live with invented fear and desperation, ensuring our decline.

Brother Flanagan Reporting for Duty

I can now recommend a permanent news fast from the other side of the divide. What a difference it makes. Everything I've written, about the fate of the world and political and social irresponsibility, dial it down in your mind. From an 8 in intensity to, let's say, a 7.8.

Consider me more of a monk. When I was in college I visited the Abbey of Gethsemane in Kentucky a couple of times. I'm not very religious but they would put you up and feed you for free. I admired the monks to begin with but I didn't think they had a clue about the world.

They understood everything way better than I did. I came away thinking that it's very hard to see past the noise when you're out in the shit. You ride all the data points up and down and get roughed up in the deal. The monks saw the larger trends from a place of security.

We're yet in the middle of a national nervous breakdown, to my mind, but I feel the pain less now. Still, for the sake of God and humanity, don't vote Republican. Feed the children, house the homeless and take care of people. Let everyone vote and pay taxes like a grownup. 

Maybe, someday, Republicans will get on board with this. For now it's up to us.

Dugout

The average Republican millionaire wonder wakes up in the dugout of daddy's team and is told he has hit a home run, which he has, by being born. Barring precocious incompetence, and maybe even with it, their lives are then set. 

It used to be that the family money was made drafting off the federal government one way or another. That's the thing that has changed most significantly. They now see greater opportunities to make money in other ways. 

So there's a huge marketing campaign to convince people that government is the enemy and corporations incarnated goodness. Self-interest poses as philanthropy. Greed as charity. Cynicism as faith. But they are investors.

Looking for returns. And the returns, since the advent of Republican hegemony, have been immense. It doesn't take much effort to document Republican reassurances that cutting taxes on the wealthy will benefit everyone.

Going back forty years. It didn't turn out to be true. We are now on track to become a country in which inherited wealth dominates everything, an invisible empire, unaccountable to any individual or institution, and international. 

And ruthless. It's a game and we have lost. Human lives are included in the stakes, and the success or failure of countries. Being on top is relative, so their philosophy of creative destruction doesn't mean they always win.

But on balance and over time the privileged class breaks away from the pack, leaving the mass of humanity struggling behind. This is how the pressure builds for cataclysm. The rich are okay even with that. 

 

They think this sort of thing is inevitable. 

Take Away

Fussing around today, Easter Sunday, I came upon a cache of old pictures and was quickly taken back more decades than I like to think possible. I have been very fortunate in my life but also endured a spell of real bad luck, which I can first date to when I was twelve.

My sister had begun a meltdown by then which lasted the rest of her life. She died a few years ago in New York City and had been living in an utter shithole and working as an intermediary in the prostitution business. She was brilliant and stunningly good at a number of things.

If I were to try to sum up my life as I just did my sister's I have no idea what I would say. I have probably under-realized my potential but I'm pretty sure I opted not to go down that road in my late teens. Not to define myself in that way, I mean. Occasionally I think you have moments of insight.

I once saw a totally unrestrained and probably spoiled child in a grocery and thought "shit, it's me." My incredibly nice parents had been wanting a child for fifteen years when they had me and had lost a full-term, perfectly formed baby years earlier. They had adopted my sister two years before I was born.

They may not have had the heart to discipline us enough, meaning my sister and me and my brother who came along after me. More bad luck followed my sister's falling apart, in the way of sickness and death, and it all came back looking at those pictures. I'm curious about all this.

But at the same time I kind of don't care. I mean I'm curious but not looking for some revelation. I read a book by a priest years ago. He thought that the parables were the most important part of the Bible, thematically and structurally, and that the most important of these was the one about the seed and sower.

What does it say? Shit happens. Get over it. So that may be the wisdom of the Bible, succinctly, and I'm okay with it. The philosophers and physicists seem to me to agree, though more: "Shit is happening, be cool with it." Okay, I'm cool. Cool right now and at peace, thankful for all the wonderful love I got as a child.

And sorry for any bratty, grocery store behavior I had a hand in. And any ongoing bratty behavior, for those of you who know me now. It takes an enormously forgiving heart to carry on well in life, I think, firstly toward yourself, then toward life itself and the indescribable strangeness of it.

Was that a heckler? Something about my own indescribable strangeness and would I please shut up? I can take that.

Days of Wine and Roses

Art Pope is having a ball in North Carolina. Who knew you could buy a state. You could see it coming, though. For a few decades things that were once named for worthy citizens or communities or anything other than living, wealthy individuals have been named for money.

Schools, arenas, you name it. Why not a state? Call it Roses or ThriftWorld or something, in honor of Pope. I like ThriftWorld. The whole School of Public Health at UNC was named for a rich guy. Let's get it over with and rename the state instead of chipping away at it piecemeal. 

The Popists also fired the president of UNC and decommissioned the poverty center in a throwback to the days of segregation. There's no practical point to it. It's a primal display of power and an insult to their opponents. The most telling expression of power is the ability to be arbitrary. 

So they're being arbitrary. You can see why the righties want guns, ones that are designed to kill people efficiently: to make sure the dispossessed can't fight back effectively. This is the old way. Different groups play by different sets of rules. It's not the rule of law but the law of the jungle.

Pope and his pals drink the intoxicating wine of racism and live in fear because they grow soft while the oppressed grow strong. The adversity produces strength no matter how much they try to ensure weakness. The dispossessed must be cowed. It's the only way they can be kept down.

That and being incarcerated. But Pope's day will come. He will reap what he has sown. The seeds of discord will eventually return home, to the fatass white boys who enforce oppression through their surrogates, henchmen and mercenaries. The racism is utterly real, not a tactic or a ruse.

Though they are too cowardly to fight their own battles the racism is inseparable from their being. They will die racists. Church-going racists. Self-righteous racists. Bible-quoting racists. Constitution-citing racists. Anonymous racists, in that they will deny it forever. It's their addiction.

The Flying, Spiraling Zucchini

Curiosity is such a cool thing. It assumes openness. I had some old zucchini in the house and it was time for the compost for them which, at my place, means I hurl them out into the field. 

The question is: can you spiral a zucchini? I put this one out there, for solicitation of input, and I'll see if there is a web presence on it later, a zucchini-hurlers anonymous or instructions or a wiki.

Maybe there's something in the Bible about it, obliquely, in which case Tom Cotton and the Jesus coalition will want to have their say, that authority being absolute and unassailable and sure.

Why didn't these people become Ministers? Isn't that where the belong? Perhaps they are. Stealth Ministers, their sheep's cloak. Someday they will be exposed, if we aren't beyond hope.

Meanwhile, in spite of their opposition, I can afford to be curious. I insist on being curious. I love to be curious. May I stay curious forever, and you with me. It's so much a part of being human.

It's Later Than You Think

Can we possibly get rid of Daylight Savings Time? I think it's the work of the devil. I leave one, old analog clock on real time to remind me what it is and I always like it better. It's now 7:45 real time, 8:45 bullshit time.

I'm latish but not really. It's related to the productivity perplex, I bet, our American obsession with making more or at least doing more. I want to do less and be more, before my being becomes nothingness. 

No More SideBoob

This morning I deleted all the news apps I have on the tablet and smartphone. I'm not going to take it anymore. HuffPost was the worst. It should be renamed SideBoob. Anyway I think I got them all.

There was one too many conversation where I found myself thinking "this isn't me" and still couldn't rein in the indignation and get a perspective. It's a contagion. These news sites aren't the problem.

But they're poorly-functioning antibodies in relation to the malaise. I'll take up residence in the political body in a place less essential and less affected by the trouble, like the big toe. You can join me there.

Where's the Wreckage?

Michele Bormann, I mean Bachmann, has compared Barack Obama to the German pilot who flew his plane into the ground. I say, where's the wreckage? Barack is only one of the brave Democratic volunteers cleaning up the debris left by a president of Michele's persuasion who parachuted safely into Texas as his plane screamed into the earth. 

He was technically the pilot. No matter, but to see Republcan strength of leadership watch the film clip of that brave man learning of the 9/11 attacks while uneasily interacting with a classroom of black kids. He then flew around the country in a disgraceful panic as the citizenry was left hanging. The German co-pilot was at least braver than our guy.

  

Michele's leader lives on. 

Light Bulb

I ask you this

Can an unnatural thing exist?

Doesn't it's existence

Make it natural

By definition

Because nothing exists

Outside of nature

It's all branding

The plasticity of meaning

The only real thing

Is invention

Eureka!

Been Up So Long It Looks Like Down To Me

(the title is the content)

A Species of Vanity

We're so vain

We think it's all about us 

Don't we?

Don't we?

Expanding Gases

We're all suckers

Expanding gases

Manifest energy

Without destiny

But maybe free

Emissions in the dark 

Not nocturnal

You dirty mind

What does it mean

Nothingness 

It doesn't compute

Nothing does

I mean

I'm not mean 

Are you

What does it mean

You meanie 

Common Purpose

There are no conspiracies

Only people acting in concert

Out of tune with humanity

But the common purpose unites them against us

They don't need conspiracies

Why assume the risk?

They all know what they want done

Always pushing waiting to find the weakness

We are the weakness 

We're on the same side we're told

We think we are but we're not

They're against us

Really just for themselves

The same thing though

The way it plays out we lose

We're losers

Advice of Counsel

For mere mortals "counsel" means a lawyer. More likely, a friend or colleague. For the elect it means Jesus, so Ted Cruz must have had a meetup with his Savior before he had his coming-out at Liberty Baptist University, where the school mascot should be the BIGOT. 

Did he mean to establish his hopelessness as a candidate for the presidency at that bastion of backwardness and homogeneity? Oh, my God, a "homo" word. They will be horrified. Retroactively, having Jesus as lead defense means you are existentially not-guilty.

Incrimination is impossible with Jesus on your side. You're not guilty by virtue of salvation no matter what. You are right irrespective of conscience or morality, results or intents, mortal or venial sins. Can the saved commit a mortal sin? Are they absolved instantly?

It's all a conundrum to heathen like me, dwellers in imperfection and uncertainty. At least my dog loves me. I'm sure I'm a living insult to creation in Cruz's eyes. I'll regard the Religious Right's salvation defense as mutation of the insanity defense and let it go at that. 

And take care of my dog, the good creature. Cruz's crowd will have to represent Christ in the world. I hope they're right about their salvation. Jesus will be seriously pissed with them if they're not. It would mean an amazing post-mortem reversal of fortune for them.

Yoknapatawpha Country

Years ago, reading Fitzgerald and Faulkner, I thought there were parallels between the Irish Catholic and Southern cultures: defeated peoples whose dreams were invested in the invention of romantic worlds which dulled the humiliation of defeat and ongoing oppression. Their religions were made illegal, Catholicism in the case of the Irish and racism in the case of the South. 

The Irish are credited with being politically savvy because of this. They learned to uphold their beliefs and institutions through clandestine activity, which played out weirdly in the new world, where they were politically astute but heavy handed and insensitive to the possibility that they might oppress people themselves. So now with Southerners in America. They're running everything. 

They're incredibly good at the political thing and oblivious to the harm they do. There's no sense of responsibility at all but extreme cunning in exerting minority control of the political system. Always, in the US and probably everywhere, there have been hard truces won to keep the interests of oligarchs and big money from winning out and screwing everyone and themselves.

So much for that. Big business is running America. This is beyond bad. This is the end. Of everything. Life as we know it in America. It's over. It's not just beyond bad but beyond sad. And we have the political will of white Southerners to thank for it. I hope they're proud of themselves. I liked our country the way it was. Democratic. Strong. Idealistic. Independent. Kind of free.

Down the Up Staircase

America is really getting interesting. I was a student of cultures once and remember wondering, in two different disciplines, how countries with huge momentum could screw things up independently of external pressure and fail quickly. Things got worse: all the arts, government, technology. 

Read the satires of Juvenal or about Athens in 415 and the desecration of the Herms. It wasn't just me. We talked about it openly in class, first in studying economic history and then classical cultures. Most of the European empires sank from their own stupidity, usually by overreaching.

Think how hard it was for the Union to defeat the Confederacy in the Civil War. It looks inevitable now but beating someone into submission on their own turf is hard. Even if an enemy waltzes in they still have to maintain the place, against the will of the inhabitants and their allies.

This is all a country like ours has to do, keep from being conquered. Now try to imagine our defeat. So what are we so afraid of and why are we stirring up trouble everywhere? Bad leadership elected by us. Reelected after they screwed up. Good work is unrecognized and unrewarded.

America has always on balance been an open way up for a whole lot of people. On balance. If you were free to try you could move up. Not any more. We're in a special lockdown and even people who are working their asses off are moving down. This is only disputed in creationist circles.

Disputed because they have caused it, through bad policy, and they know it. The blame will come to rest on them. Why not now, while there may be some chance to reverse the damage and restore goodness? Look at the trends since the 1970's. This is not difficult to figure out, people.

Bad policy has bad consequences so you change it. Even conservatives believe we're going backwards but won't admit that the age of our ascent was all made possible by progressive policies, with progressive taxation and investment in infrastructure, when it's simply true.

By observation. So they argue stridently, as they must, to overwhelm common sense. The ascent occurred over a longish period but, still, the connection with sound, progressive policy is clear. Ted Cruz thinks Republicans win by owning the crazy, by insisting on extreme policy. 

That's his shit. I think progressives win by owning the reality that we built the country, we're the good guys, and that conservative policies are observable failures. We argue the record. I'll argue it. And, by the way, Republicans desecrated the Herms.

Jingo-bells, Jingo-bells...

It must be Christmas all the time at FOX NEWS. I wonder if they ever take down the tree. You live in an alternative reality of invented truth. You make money like crazy and it doesn't matter if you get caught making stuff up. Worst case, if you really screw up, you get the special Republican platinum parachute: you somehow get hugely rewarded for a flameout.

What a cool world. Remember that Miller guy who yelled "he lies" or such at the president? The money poured in on him. The system incentivises insanity. It's this way for the FOX people, like Glenn Beck. It was this way for the neocons. For Bush. For the people who caused the financial collapse. What do you have to do to get fired or demoted or lose money? 

In their world there are no consequences. Not for them. There are for us. 

Otherworldly: You Can Take It With You

The line between life and death isn't a big deal for conservatives, I suppose because their entitlement straddles the divide. Individual salvation is manifest in this world. And there's a national version, according to which the USA is God's chosen country.

Look Back in Anxiety

By the old Moulmein Pagoda, lookin' eastward to the sea,
There's a Burma girl a-settin', and I know she thinks o' me;
For the wind is in the palm-trees, and the temple-bells they say:
"Come you back, you British soldier; come you back to Mandalay!"

The anger of the postwar generation has given way to angst--and arthritis--as they get old and pass on. So many are gone already, but their indignation amounted to nothing. Oh, it had a lot of entertainment value, but the puritanical impulse ruined it as it ruins everything because it doesn't mean anything to be angry, but it means something to be angry about something. 

The reaction against the blind acceptance of values, the best spin on the fifties and sixties, degenerated quickly into the blind rejection of values, which is vandalism and meaninglessness, the characteristic work of unevolved adolescent boys, blowing things up only to view the result. Then they realize--you hope--that they can't still have the thing they just exploded.

And that the blowing up of things will eventually make the freedom to blow things up impossible. In the best case the awareness sticks and they grow up. Those who don't should be kept out of positions of power or they will wreck everything, so you wonder what percentage of world leaders live there, in the land of destruction and arbitrary power, the land of the man--DeLay.

Maybe the vandalism is meaningful in a larger context, as it must be to be comprehensible, but the people who were against any kind of authority won out in the sixties. It means something to be against arbitrary authority but not against all authority. Without it there is no peace. Peace is the result of some kind of order and I think the authority should be impersonal and adaptive. 

Not associated with some sect or nation or religion or person. Children should understand that parents are not the authority, for example: that parents themselves submit to an authority deemed good by them and by consensus and expect the kids to submit to some extent as well. If the kids can come up with something better, well, swell, we'll adopt it, subject to approval.

But there are people who are instinctively against authority forever and those who love it whether it's any good or not, the puritanical extremes, where there's no dialectic or interpolation and opportunity for progress and improvement. There are those conservatives who were too frightened by the sixties and retreated into certainty and absolutism, attacking an exotic liberal bogeyman.

We're a progressive country, a tradition worth being conservative about. England had this problem and messed it up, the reality of the British Empire diverging from their ideals and their self-image and resulting in the romanticizing of incredible stupidity. Gandhi saw this and threw it in their faces. We could have used a Ghandi and instead we got Tom DeLay and Jack Abramoff.

Who showed an amazing disregard for decency in relation to Native Americans. Now the next generation of nutballs is romanticizing our stupidity. Someone from one of our vassal states needs to wake us up--another Gandhi, perhaps--a brown person from somewhere to call us on our crap and force us into a reckoning with the reality of our exploitation of the world's resources. 

To say nothing of our ambition for world domination. Is it impossible for us to see how our aptly-named predator drones and their use must look to the rest of the world? Even our friends will want to have defenses against us. Otherwise we might incinerate some suspect on their turf because we think it necessary. Our presumption is incredible. We're so like the English.

If you haven't you should see MY BOY JACK and how Rudyard Kipling naively got his son killed in WWI. It's sad as hell. If I could stand it I would bring up the Bush family and make comparisons. In a better world the ghost of Molly Ivins would haunt them all into mental health facilities or at least give them incurable rashes.