One Oath is Enough

Something's wrong when nearly all of the elected representatives of the Republican party take a second oath in Washington. And that party is always in power because they insist on having their way even when they lose and that second oath is way more enforceable than the other, the oath of office.

This is about Grover Norquist, the anti-tax man. Grover should have been run out of Washington in shame after the Abramoff scandal, a telling glimpse of what these guys actually stand for. We didn't need another glimpse but there it is, the white boys stealing and engaging in insulting, racist small talk.

It is fundamental. Grover's organization is anti-democratic to a revolutionary extent. If we can't stop such an open and blatant challenge to the essential, fair functioning of our government we are done-for and deserve to be. I won't begrudge Grover his private-jet forays to Burning Man.

He can keep all that but he must go.

Cut It Out

Let's be clear, when you hear the word "cut" coming from the Republican side, substitute the word "kill." Cutting is killing. When they move money from people who need it to people who don't people die. When they squander money like bandits in places like Iraq people die. 

While they insist that the war on drugs continue people die. People die while they piss away America's prosperity living like pigs. People die while they shop and play golf and manage their investments and live smug lives. Republicans kill people. This is their idea of normal.

In My Opinion...

Racism is anything other than judging people by standards of behavior.

Original sin is taking things for granted, especially the gift of your life.

Logo-land

I had one of those dreams in which all the ugliness of the world was gone, both the physical ugliness and interpersonal strife. It wasn't wimpy, just not ugly. All the buildings were painted-brick with big windows and they were fresh but not quite gleaming.

It was a multifarious world, full of surprises and small businesses, everything unique but clearly part of a system, with shops and manufacturing and farms and interesting venues of every sort, entirely organic and obviously the product of an evolutionary process.

Even the instances of weirdness and dysfunction and mildly dangerous or threatening places made sense. It all fit and had a role, of a sort. I guess it was a complete melding of a child's view, with the validity of things assumed as presented, and an adult view. 

I was an adult in the dream, kind of, and looking at everything non-judgmentally but not without suspicion, trustingly but not naively. The most remarkable aspect was how everything simply belonged and had a place, as in a biological system. 

People were living as a species in a way that made sense in the world, though at the top in terms of power, and interpersonally like an ecosystem as well, hierarchically, but smoothly and without striving or obsession, and there was only walking and trains.

What was strikingly missing were corporate, consolidated entities. There were bigger things but always still at a human scale. You never turned a corner and saw a mall or a Walmart. The political or social system was transparent, allowing people to do what they do. 

To work and to live. The dream left me with an intense yearning, I'm not sure for what, but I think for immersion and belonging, to be part of a world within which everyone is free and independent and secure, and where there is proportion, logos.

They say somewhere that it was there in the beginning.

Howling Mad

All you can hope for, watching the parade of lunatics now running for president from the Republican side, is that there is an undiscovered mechanism wherein, at the highest level of insanity and perversity, an organism becomes too at-odds with itself to function and raptures or is transmogrified or morphs into another state of being in order to preserve itself, an elemental trick of survival. 

Take Ted Cruz. In order to be as consistently wrong as Cruz is there has to be an understanding, somewhere within him, of what is right but it must be unconscious or repressed. He must be possessed. Aha, there must be a demon in him, or gremlin, which explains the strange, destructive output of the Cruz-entity and the inconsistency of his opinions with everything he purports to be.

He says he is a Christian and a loyal citizen and patriot, a lover of America, and a crusader for what is right and true and, yet, there is no evidence of a conscience at a child's level, that of connecting the dots, simple cause and effect. Cruz/demon must be required to defend itself: the wars and killing, ethno-chauvinism, intolerance in every form, heartlessness in the face of human need, etc.

Perhaps this will act as an exorcism and the demon will flee, leaving an identifiable human form, maybe alive and with a normal, functioning conscience, capable of living with other people in the absence of predator drones, persecution and extreme judging. It is an interesting, indeterminate situation. Demons are notoriously cunning and tough so the Cruz carcass, the bodily vessel, may not survive.

But the soul we assume to be there somewhere, however beaten-down and demoralized, will either be able to function within the body known as "Cruz" or be free, a better outcome anyway for both Cruz, the man assumed to exist, independently of the demon, and society. Keep a crucifix with you in case you encounter him. And maybe some garlic. Be prepared. He's a piece of work.

In Celebration of Shooting Niggers

It's pretty clear that America's long love affair with shooting and otherwise killing and abusing black people has taken on new life. Call it a pastime. On the way somewhere today I saw two pickup trucks flying large rebel flags in celebration of the murders of those black people in Charleston.

This is a criminal culture with a deep streak of defensiveness. For decades Americans have made excuses for their backward, white brethren in Dixie when they couldn't be kept out of sight and dragged their knuckles around the yard, but they're altogether off the compound now and causing trouble.

And behaving more like apes and aborigines than any of their Darwin-loving fellow countrymen. Some years ago Hendrik Hertzberg wrote something fantasizing about the secession of Texas and all the things America could do without that ball and chain. It was too wonderful for words.

Sane and rational and humane, with plenty of PBS. Is it really too much to hope for? Oh, those rebel flags, they haunt us. We kill black people in denial of our destiny, our doom, because they are us, the better part of us, the part that is vulnerable and enduring and free. We, the white people, are in chains.

Any Yankee for President

Barack Obama is the first Yankee president since JFK. Every president in between was a Republican, and an honorary Southerner, since desegregation, or a Southerner: Johnson, Carter and Clinton. 

The South has been holding the country hostage over race forever. America itself will end before this shit does but I'd like to have another Yankee president, just to see their blood boil. And boil it will.

House of Cards

The Republican police state, typified by the NSA, is there to serve only one master, the wealthy elite: the wealthy, Republican elite. Their ruling beauracracy is a combination of Mad Men and House of Cards. The house of cards, though, is our state and society. There is no truth.

Not for them. No reality. No accountability. The marketing is the product: reality is something they make up so the product is irrelevant or nonexistent. They invent and advertise threats that aren't there. Fear is the unrooted, made-up, self-serving result. They love fear.

And they're very good at acting, creating that imaginary world of fear, with mercifully low taxes for them. Let the riffraff pay for their police state. They've got greens fees. The America we knew and loved doesn't exist anymore. There's a play in its place. The plot is simple.

We're the good guys. Lots and lots of finger pointing fills out the drama. The finger is never pointed back at them, but it could be. Whoa, you can't do that! They will not tolerate dissent because their new, invented and inverted America is a fragile fabrication, a house of cards.

The Decline and Fall of the American Empire

America was great, but a third of the country was run by terrorists. The other two-thirds, after decades of waffling and unconscionable delays, finally insisted that the oppression end in "Dixie," the terrorist sub-state, in the 1960's, and that the subjugated minority be free.

Capitalists and corporatists then seized power through an alliance with the disaffected inhabitants of "Dixie," anti-democrats, racists and reconstituted rebels (just add desegregation--and stand back). The tactic worked and the American state sank.

Into decline, that is, wanton consumerism and moral decay, marked by compulsion, recklessness, frenzied activity and denial, the sad drive to be as big a pig as possible before it all ends in an orgy of vicariousness, inauthenticity and second-hand experiences. 

Sex and money, though, are pursued first-hand. Empires usually last about 250 years. We were supposed to be an anti-imperial country and immune to this. Also it was thought that knowing the cycle of empires would enable us to avoid it, but we have succumbed.

Those who asserted that we are exceptional and insisted on it have doomed us to an imperial end. Boo, hiss. We're now on the path of "decline and fall" and not an exception. Exceptionally bad, perhaps, because of our power and the falseness of it.

We should say to the world honestly, like good imperialists: "We take what we want. Don't stand in our way."

The Partial Perspective Vortex

I have found a way of inducing and instilling the awareness of how interconnected everything is. Clearly there is a crisis here, brought on by selfishness and self-centeredness, so much so that the denial of reality is rampant. It is now common, for example, for someone to deny that they are doing something while they are doing it and in the presence of witnesses. 

The regimen involves both methods and machinery, and software and hardware, but assumes that the subjects are not entirely deprived of conscience and incapable of seeing the interconnections, that the subjects would feel something if you shot their mother in the head in front of them, that is, and understand that it really happened and can't be spun or undone or remediated. 

Virtual reality works both ways, that's what we have learned. It enhances the sense of connectedness in some people and dulls it in others. The limiting case so far has been George W. Bush. After weeks of effort there was no result so we finally shot Barbara Bush in the head in front of him--she was super-old, anyway--and, still, nothing: no sense of the reality of it.

It didn't work so we have incarcerated him at Guantanamo Bay as a menace to society. It does put a different face on the deaths of all those people, hundreds of thousands, who perished because of him and makes us think that he is an outlier. Guantanamo is pretty close to Florida and Jeb will visit, he says, once he forgives his brother for causing their mother to be shot.

 

People Who Think That Someone Who Doesn't Know Something They Know Is Stupid Are Stupid

Technical Support, are you there?

They're Invested

I have no issue with capitalism, per se, but it's the nature of my writing that I overstate the case to try to overcome the normal immersion of people in their everyday lives. You try to get people to step back and think: "My God, this is crazy." If it is, of course, crazy.

But what is crazy? Sometimes it's hard to figure out but there are rules: vested interest, unreason and religious fanaticism, for example, being important indicators. All three may occur at once and in a complementary way. Are they getting rich? Do they talk sense?

Do they think they have a special relationship with a deity? Ask yourself and you will know. When in doubt: follow the money. Societies create capital, not individuals, so societies have a claim on it. People who deny this are not trustworthy and only want more for themselves.

Human Preserves

Capital is human preserves. You boil people down and add sugar, or pack them in salt or brine them and there you have capital. One person can thus become the means to another's ends and the results not spoil. Natural resources are similar but meaningless without work.

People are preserved through labor and in other ways. This is the boiling and brining. There's no reason why a person shouldn't realize the benefit of their own productive activity but there are impediments to that, evidently insurmountable, in our society.

Capitalists are jealous of God. Their own lives aren't enough for them, but work itself is evanescent and workers are unmotivated when you take away their earnings and unpredictable as well, prone to injury and death, so you find a way to preserve them.

Discipline and deception are components in the preservation, with deception preferred because the human assets are less put at risk since the discipline may involve bodily harm, slavery being an extreme example. Studying it is the way to understand the process.

Wage-slaves are less obviously but more insidiously exploited since they may be convinced of their own autonomy when they have none or at best very little. Witness a worker in an Amazon warehouse. And then there is geofencing, worker site-monitoring.

There's no way to make the case that this kind of treatment is civilized or appropriate. It's an imposition on personal freedom and a violation of individual rights and should be illegal, as a form of intra-species predation, which is immoral by any normal standard.

The Silver Age

When I studied cultures I wondered if it wasn't more fun to live in a decadent age. Living in one now I think that it is more fun for irresponsible citizens but not others. Irresponsibility is rewarded and thrives. Here's where I was once an exceptionalist.

I didn't think it would happen to us. I thought that we were different. Even as we sink you can see it playing out. Those who caused the decline throw everyone else out of the lifeboats and sail away. I would rather go down and drown than be with them. 

Did we ever have a Golden Age? As golden as it gets, I guess. There is a strange brilliance to our technology but our morality is stale and increasingly retrograde. It isn't uncool to think morality matters. It isn't judgemental. Well, it is, but not personally. 

Nobody wants to judge anybody but it's implicit in everything. We make allowances, more so as people are further removed from us, but there must be standards that apply everywhere and to everyone or we are destined forever for failure.

Save Me the Watusi

Is it just me or does the 1960's look to you like the last great flourish of American creativity, openness, innocence and optimism? Man, I miss it. 

Picking Peaches in the New Jerusalem

The setting: a small town in South Carolina, 1960. There's a boy, 16, a country-club white kid from a good family of moderate means. Summers he has access to a flat-bed truck and uses it to collect black guys to pick peaches. He gets $1/picker and doesn't pick peaches. 

He can sit in the shade all day. This is the Republican economic model. You say anything and they scream that they worked for the money, which they kind of did, but the black guys worked a lot more for a lot less. Is it any wonder the white boys want it to stay this way? 

The story is true.

Offer It Up

I want to offer up my entire life, all of the unease and discomfort--not really suffering--to God through an intermediary, maybe James Gandolfini, hoping that some good will come from all the wasteful harm I've witnessed being caused by Republicans. It irritates me so much that they have had their way with our country for all of my adult life and ruined it.

The USA is not what it was. We don't see ourselves reflected in other countries with horrible, unresolvable sectarian shit but that is us and the crazy side has won, as it has in most of those other places. God, this is sad. The worst elements have won and it may never be fixed or I may not live to see it if it is, so I offer up the pain of it through the intercession of that good man, James.

He played a thug but he was a nice person. He must look down and see that the thugs are still in control and how good people--nice, responsible people--are unable to slow the runaway train of Republican madness. As of now, anyway. I do not give up hope but I offer it all up meanwhile because it's better than despair, which I have had enough of already. I am more at peace now.

The Great Repression

Clearly there's a cultural equivalent of repression, with all the bad consequences manifested on a societal scale, the main thing being denial and projection.

Mirror, mirror, on the wall, whose the most fucked-up of all? Someone else, of course. 

Someone Stole Helen

The longer I look back the more I think that 9/11 was a pivotal event in our history, one of a few big ones, not that it had to be. It retroactively made the questionable election of 2000 very significant. Think of how it might have been different. Think of the things that could and should have been said, immediately after it happened:

We must grieve first, especially for those directly affected. Terrorists try to create fear. We must not give into it and the attack was easy, anyway. Free, pluralistic, open societies are easy targets. The attack was an attack on our values. If we shared their craziness they might not have attacked us. We must not betray our values because of the attack and become like them. This is what they want. 

It is losing. In fact we must renew our commitment to those values and look carefully to see if we have betrayed them already. We need our strength now and those values are our strength. We can make some good out of this terrible event by recommitting ourselves to our essential beliefs and deepening our understanding of those beliefs. It's also the best way to honor the dead.

And so on and so on. Sadly what we got, because of the utter thoughtlessness and lack of character of our leaders, was the opposite. May there be a shooting range in Hell for them where they are eternally the targets. We abandoned our values and lost our national sense of self and our identity. The terrorists have won. The world is now much more the world they wanted: primitive and uncivilized.

The world of the Trojan war, compulsive and destructive, over nothing, but maybe honor. Think, now, what our Homeric epithets would be. Wise or wily? Reactive or restrained? We have lost. We are not the people we claim to be. We stumble around trying to find ourselves but we're unhinged, a nation of lost souls seeking peace, holding to a self-image that doesn't apply, that we're independent and free.

Good luck to us in looking for peace. We have chosen the gods of chaos, mistakenly or unconsciously, in our insistence on simplicity and certainty. We have planted the seeds of discord everywhere thinking we won't be affected or not thinking at all. The terrorist attacks threw that back at us, showing that we're not immune, not a chosen people, perhaps, and not always right and always right with God. 

The Ronnies

There are all these awards: the Oscars, Grammys, Tonys, Emmys, Obies, the Clios, as we now know from Mad Men, etc. Ronald Reagan blazed a path of creativity that has many followers and has resulted in many adherents to the new Republican doctrine of unreality. Ronnie, in fact, blew clean through the distinction between reality and invention. He is said to have been unable to keep his memories of the movies separate from what really happened and his memory was reportedly outstanding in some ways, nearly photographic. 

Anyway it was probably very visual and, I would guess, correspondingly low on the reality-check scale, an amazing trove or repository of incoherent matter, scattershot images and streams of images selectively nurtured for their value on a personal vanity index. Ronnie's vanity project became the nation's, a parallel world of feel-good stuff, a virtuality, probably needed to soothe Republican souls in carrying the weight of Manifest Destiny and the White Man's Burden of being simultaneously wealthy and worthless.

The Ronald Reagan Awards, or Ronnies, should honor those who have excelled in this creative work, the making-up of a realm of happy-talk, free from the need to conform to any measure of verification or intelligibility. There would be an award for creating the most crippling debt, one for military malfeasance, one for depriving children of food, one for depriving people of healthcare and so on. All of these assume reverse spin, which is the point, and are guised as the opposite of what they are. Freedom is limitation.

Security is risk. Fiscal responsibility is reckless abandon and debt. Individuality is conformity. Respect is presumption. Ownership is enslavement. The statuette is a representation of a chimp named Chump, an iconic and ironic reminder of how easy it is to get people to believe anything and to mimic it, so the nonsense is repeated and believed and on it goes until there is a calamity, like a financial collapse. It is then that the best creative work is done, when it is most hard to deny the reality of Republican incompetence.

We are Utterly Defeated

How is it that the Democrats can fail to see how utterly defeated they are? If they did there would be some hope that, someday, progressive principles would be seen rightly, as the true American tradition and, voilà, the Democrats would be revered and consistently elected to run it all, with the privileged Republican class as a foil, which is how it should be.

But the Democrats have implicated themselves in the Republican mess. No one is effectively representing progressive principles. The system has gone so far right a progressive can't function within it. We need an outsider, someone charismatic, who can blow through all the crap and speak plainly to the American people, a real leader, like Franklin Roosevelt.

Born in the CSA

It hurts my heart that the rebels are misrepresenting America in the world. Rather than outlawing the Confederate Flag in those states that insist, duh, that it has nothing to do with racism I think we should adopt it as the nation's flag. 

And why not adopt the Confederate Constitution, while we're at it. Let them have it all and God bless their pointy little heads. Oh, those are hats, of a sort, and, below them, sheets. In the next Olympics we'll all be chanting: CSA, CSA, CSA!

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.