Better Call Paul

Paul Ryan knows his place--as a toady, a functionary and a fixer. He intends to be a midwife at the birth of the new conservative order which happens only to be the oldest model of human incorporation ever, a society built on inequality, exploitation and injustice.

Eventually the subjugated masses will rise up and attack their oppressors or opt for the Anglo-racist, puritanical example of moderated, legislated and arbitrary social stratification rooted in cynicism and despair. Hooray, everybody loses, the wished-for fate of Ryanism.

It's time to call Paul. The birth is imminent. 

Trump Soldiers On

The tendency with Trump is to get bogged down in the daily display of depravity, thereby losing sight of the larger implications of his wickedness. With the latest gaff involving a call to the mother of a deceased soldier the larger context is that soldiers are losers, fools and lackeys in the Trumpian metaphysics of greed. 

For true Trumpists any kind of self-sacrificing or seemingly principled behavior is pathetic and a refuge for those who can't cut it in a competitive world, never mind that most of Trump's backers are crooks and inherited their money or were advantaged from the start. Or, they are delusional, fatalistic religious fanatics.

The Love That Dare Not...

I love the government. Disregarding all of our horrible activities abroad the government has, at home, tried to wrest freedom away from its hoarders and the oppressing forces of poverty, racism, greed and intolerance. The government tried to guarantee that average citizens would have reasonable means of subsistence, to which they are entitled, and the autonomy of their lives and bodies. 

The money-men want to see a new age of economic oppression and the religious fanatics want to see the secular systems of laws and traditions again under the thumb of irrational, superstitious, idolatrous believers in "Christian" government, ignoring the individualistic imperatives of both our civil and religious convictions. In other words, they want to send us all to hell, either side of the grave.

No Happy Ending

America's happy ending is going up in smoke, wasted by Republican greed, dishonesty and incompetence. It will be the great American tragedy--the loss of our freedom. 

In Jesus's Name, Amen!

Evangelical Christianity has created a government in its image and the end-times are upon us. Amen and Hallelujah! Deprive children and the poor and elderly especially of food and the care needed to keep them alive--in Jesus's name. Amen! 

Destroy creation and plunder the planet out of existence--praise Jesus and Amen! Muslims and other heathen may be killed at will, ideally by drones and other cowardly means, while the people of God suck down resources like there is no tomorrow. Amen!

It's in the news, there is no tomorrow! You can quote them on that! God wants his people to live like pigs. It's in the Bible--the prosperity gospel--and they will sweep you away with their mighty sword if you resist. Amen! Hallelujah! And, fuck you!

Trump Shits Himself Again

Trump signs executive orders with the aplomb and pride of a little boy's only supposedly creative activity: "Look at what I did!" He exhibits a self-satisfied smile, assuming an accomplishment while laying out another huge turd.

"Good boy, Donald!" He just shit all over everything again. Someone, clean up the mess. 

Et Tutu, Brutus?

Wait, there's an image emerging from my subconscious, repeatedly forming and fading, a new archetype of inappropriateness and horror: pale and pudgy, Donald Trump in a diaper-tutu, otherwise unclothed and drooly, nervously active and impatient or pouty and pensive because the world isn't shaping or conforming itself instantly to his will. He's a vain, frustrated fop and a baby, having known only one authentic outcome in his life and angry at anything else--Donald must get his way and be fed and indulged.

No one and nothing else matters. Though, it's prejudicial and unfair to talk as if he's a card-carrying grownup because he isn't. He's an immature, un-evolved, parasitic little monster and brute, living a fantasy and an illusion--a larval drama of insatiable oral craving so severe it preempts or negates his humanity. He's a one-man asylum of arrestedness and a belching bambino squirming and pawing at the recalcitrant tit of cosmic largesse, assuming a false and unearned status as something other than the maggot he is.

Funny, I Don't Feel Like Vermin

Looking at the earth from space it would be time to conclude that human beings are vermin. We will reproduce ourselves out of existence and into oblivion. We kill our own and we live in self-created filth, a spreading malignancy and horror. Hooray for us. The end is near. 

Venality Fair

Venality is so assumed in human behavior and especially politics it only makes sense to go with the flow and begin to distinguish between its benign and malignant forms, the expectation of corruption being self-fulfilling. Benign venality would acknowledge the intensely social nature of human beings and seek to be selfish on behalf of the human macrocosm and for the longer term. 

Malignant venality would ignore the social aspects and see the seeking of individual advancement by any means--venality by its nature assuming no absolute, underlying morality--as a de facto morality because if its inevitability. It is therefore closely related to cynicism and usually effected through casuistry and moral relativism while making a show and claim of decency and necessity. 

Republicanism immediately comes to mind as an example of the malignant form, the entire thrust of its actual platform being to screw the very people it pretends to represent and support, hoping only to remain undiscovered long enough to corrupt and ruin the entire system beyond repair. That point now approaches quickly, as the seeds of cynicism, despair and confusion sprout everywhere. 

The Irish Tenor of Fox News

It's no accident that so many Irish Catholic guys are prominent at Fox News. Apart from the Catholic attachment to authority, there's compensation. Ireland was a matriarchal culture, Irish men having had their balls handed to them by various invaders and then definitively by the English. Bill O'Reilly and Hannity, for example, are desperate to assert their masculinity as bullies always will, from positions of safety and relative strength.

Megyn Kelly is demonstrating, as we speak, the power of the protective, corporate shell of Fox by flailing around outside of its confines over at NBC. Add to the Irish the southern white boys who were similarly defeated and other losers and congenital assholes and--voila!--you have the soul of the Republican Party: defensive, aggressive, violent by nature and proxy and essentially sick. Dominance and submission are always an issue.

Pathetically trying to exercise his manhood, Roger Ailes was representative, if not Irish, using his position to bully women into intimacy. O'Reilly and Trump are similar. Fox is a bubble and a fortress, ideologically divorced from reality and prone to attack spontaneously and overreact to any threat, real or imaginary. O'Reilly's "War on Christmas" is a telling, if trivial, case-in-point. Bill is reportedly a huge, oversized human being.

He never hesitated to use his stature to intimidate, as can be seen in many clips of interactions on his former show. He rises in his chair in indignation at challenges to his authority. Meanwhile they are all taking it up the ass from the political and monied interests. Hannity is somewhat different. There's a look in his eyes, said to resemble the results of fetal alcohol syndrome, of degeneracy and organic brain damage.

That "nobody home" look was also apparent in George W. Bush who proved himself, in a role of inescapable responsibility, a wastrel and reprobate. Bush was shielded from accountability, which would see him in jail after being tortured in accordance with his own beliefs in its efficacy, for getting hundreds of thousands of people needlessly killed. Fox News circumvents justice and the courts by throwing money at victims. 

Victims are bought off with millions from their deep coffers. Characteristically of cowards, these bullies are bailed out by the corporate versions of their mommies. Submission is always an area of sensitivity. They are incapable of seeing that a society can (only) function when dominance is no longer a determining factor. Fox, their own mini momma-state, runs on cowardice--distinctively Irish, bullying, blustering cowardice. 

The Emerson Corrective

I'm aware of the Emerson Collective and other high-minded organizations trying to make the world better for everyone but what sense does it make when they are working at cross-purposes with our own, supposedly elective, government? 

They should put their efforts into undoing the evil Republican assault on democracy and decency, renaming themselves the Emerson Corrective. That would do more good than anything, if the misanthropy could be stopped. 

There's no way they can win against the tidal wave of evil coming out of Washington. 

Great Dismal

Wow, the Trump swamp is a record breaker. Following the lead of Donald, their self-indulgent commander-in-chief, Tom Price, the Mnuchin munchkin and others are living high on our dime. 

Conservation of Hate

Immaterial things are conserved as well, just like matter. Southern Americans conserved racial animosity in the wake of desegegation. Cold-warriors conserved a tribal, Manichean need to have an enemy and a war. 

This is the new Republican Party, which they mostly comprise, running entirely on enmity. 

Not Personally Racist

Both Goldwater and Nixon were said to be "not personally racist" as though it's somehow better. They used their racist strategies anyway, which is worse for being cynical. The conservative "conscience" is a thing of convenience, arrogance, presumption and greed. 

They are deserving by definition. Their superiority is assumed. After decades of covert racism the overt faction, who always understood the insinuations and innuendo​, are creeping out of their caves, exposing what was always there. At least these thugs are sincere. 

Here's where it has gotten us:

Congress is besieged by Kochsuckers.
The Supreme Court is infected by hacks.
The Presidency is infested by a goon.

Being "not personally racist" isn't a good thing when racist tactics are employed. It's morally corrosive. And so now we have a system that is horrifically racist, bigoted, aggressive and cruel and nobody owns it. Our society is dissociative and in denial about what we are. 

Relatively few people are personally racist but the society is racist as hell.

Plato's Retreat

Plato's understanding of understanding was, in my view, not about power, prestige and possession but about, well, undertanding. Sure, the knowledge might be useful, but it wasn't mainly about manipulation and prediction. Aristotle, on the other hand, was the original white boy, on a quest for power. Knowledge became a thing to be acquired and owned, a source of personal and societal enhancement. 

There's a bunch of overlap. Plato used his tactics to expose and confuse his epistemological enemies. I see it as impersonal, not about him or any author or agent but about the argument itself independently of any ego-inflating effects accruing to anyone. Aristotle made big advances in areas in which there are minimal, directly practical applications but the spirit of it has undercurrents of aggression. 

I'm too rusty on this to discuss it very well but we are inheritors of the traditions of Aristotle, since the Enlightenment, and it hasn't exactly worked, not if you regard the quest for power as a faulty and futile thing and fear the nearing capability of destroying the systems that maintain us and our civilization. I count cultural suicide as a bad thing and recommend a return to the more humane ways of Plato.

The Concupiscence of a Conservative

Sexual desire and greed can't be disentangled in the dark underworld of the Republican psyche. Their lust is amorphous and ill-defined, carnal in origin but foraging afield for reassurance because of insecurity, marked by triumphalism, swag and swagger, a hopeless and vain compulsion to find, assert and demonstrate their potency. 

Trump shows the way, a marrier of women hugely weaker than him, in wealth and other ways, and ideally with an immigrant's limited command of English so they can't understand the subtler clues indicating he's an idiot, an old trick. He lords it over anyone, compulsively and recklessly, knowing deep-down what undeserving garbage he is.

Cuck Fighting

Newt Gingrich is a prime example. A passionless pussy and wimp, he must try to prove his manhood by deceit and manipulation. Nothing is ever enough because the mojo deficit is so severe. 

Now the cucks are fighting among themselves. Watch Mitch McConnell, a southern, deep-fried piece of shit and repugnant loser who should be behind a counter at a KFC. He married his money.

Mitch is being challenged and ridiculed by another cuck, our boy Trump, a true champion of the class. Take that, Mitch, and make mine extra-crispy. Crap, he's in the back kowtowing to Kochs.

Aha, and Donald is dominating Mitch's wife daily.  It's so incredibly primal and pathetic. The cuck wars continue. And Donald has the nukes while Mitch is among the chickens, a loser even there.

Children's Crusade: a Republican Dance With Death

Morally, the American Religious Right are children who think they have been called by God to symbolically recapture the the Holy Land and reinstate His rule. 

This was tried before in the Middle Ages and it didn't go well, I'll tell them. The Pied Piper of Brooklyn, their mesmerizing head, is leading them into destruction.

The 7 Habits of Trump, a Highly Ineffective Person

1. Be indescribably self-centered. It helps to be born independently rich.

2. Treat other people as objects and things to be used and discarded. 

3. Think win-lose. Constantly brag, tout yourself and blow your own horn. 

4. Belittle other people at every opportunity in order to feel more important. 

5. Be imperious, divisive, inconsistent and mean. It enhances your power.

6. Rely on others to bail you out while barking about your self-sufficiency.

7. Remember above everything else that no one matters as much as you. 

"Some Day My Prince Will Come..."

Moving on now from calamitous healthcare reform to calamitious tax reform we will witness the Republicans frolicking in an area in which they have demonstrated expertise, bankrupting the government. Why must they? Because only the government, as designed, with a balance of powers, can protect us from the final corporatization of our democracy into rule by the rich. 

The gavel will come down on Washington at last--the sale final. However powerful they may seem McConnell and Ryan are lackeys. Observe them closely. They are submissive and most comfy kowtowing to Kochs. They will be discarded eventually and live out their lives in reptilian indolence, a perfection of sangfroid--actual cold-bloodedness--protected forever from the warm-blooded masses.

Meanwhile they will try to destroy Medicare, Medicaid and Social Security as soon as the government is sufficiently insolvent, saying we can't afford it. This has always been their goal, to screw poorer people and the Middle Class out of existence. There will be huge tax cuts for the wealthy. Trickle Down and Rising Tide talk await us. And, if you still believe those tired lies--sing it!

"Someday my prince will come..." We will need all the saving we can get, as a powerless class of modern serfs and screwees hoping for miracles, saviors or means of escape, but why give away our freedom in the first place? Evidently we are undeserving of it, careless and spoiled. Shame on us for taking for granted this amazing gift for which few of us have ever sacrificed anything.

Mediocrity

I have been trying my hand at Medium and it's demoralizing reading most of the writing there, though it's democratic as hell. Extremes really do seem to meet, I find myself thinking, because the authoritarians and the solipsists end up in the same place, unable to assert humane, sustainable social values, thereby endangering the structures enabling free speech in the first place.

The spiritual solipsists represent a radically Protestant approach, schismatism down to the point that each person becomes their own, irrefutable, one true church. The radical Catholics, by adherence or adoption, are flaming authoritarians and therefore hacks, putting reason at the service of their secular, idolatrous gods (ad Maiorem something Gloriam) by analogy to their religious instincts. 

Sorry, but I don't think we can go on like this. I see dissolution in our future. The challenge we face is ourselves, a challenge from within. We are destroying ourselves needlessly. Incidentally, we are making it impossible for future generations to do anything but try to recover from our mess. I can imagine only one way out if it, charismatic leadership, and I don't see it out there.

A nun walks into a bar...

I identify more often lately with Stanley, Dudley Moore's character in Bedazzled. All I ever wanted was to have a decent life, like Stanley. Someone, however, is messing me around: "Trust me, all you have to do is cut taxes on the rich, cut taxes on the rich..."

Zoroastrianism: Real Answers in Confused Times

I believe that evangelical Christians support Trump because they think he brings us closer to the apocalypse but I draw the line and refuse to go along with planetary destruction. I can see how they associate Donald with the end-times and it fits with the denial of global warming and permanent war and military budgets that could feed every hungry person in the world, no problem. Therefore, I am turning my allegiance and affiliation to Ahura Mazda. 

Zoroastrians believe that the destruction of nature is a BAD thing. I happen to agree. Zoroastrians believe in good and evil but reject the association of evil with the physical world. I like the physical world. Though, I suppose I am prejudiced. It's all I have ever known. If evangelical Christians have a pitch for the excellence and humanitarian superiority of the obliteration of everything I am willing to listen. Meanwhile, I'm going with Zoroaster.

Dark Night of the American Seoul

Donald Trump's UN speech reveals just how careless he and his supporters are of the lives of other people--in this instance, millions of South Koreans. They don't factor into his calculations a bit. When Trump says he's looking out for America, just as every country looks out for itself, he's sending a message: get lost and screw you.

His hairness is going rogue. He's Sarah Palin with man-tits. The rest of the world can fend for themselves. At home, this is also true of anyone Trump chooses to neglect, condemn or attack. We are all at the whim of this sociopathic regime. 

Fast Times at Republican HIgh

The arrested Republican white boys, struggling as always to achieve escape velocity from their sociopathic adolescence, are carrying on with the persecution reflex and undermining democracy and majority rule whenever they can. A lot of of is pure cruelty. 

A cascade of lies washes over us. A torrent of antagonism engulfs us. What are antiheros without recourse or reference to morality? They are evil. The context of intelligibility (the LOGOS, for those with Christian sensibilities) itself is under threat and in retreat. 

Who says the good side has to win? No doubt the renegades identify at some level with Clint Eastwood's characters, bending the rules and rough around the edges but ultimately upholding a higher law: individualism, autonomy, responsibility and order.

In other words, they are conceited and delusional. Ask yourselves--do they stand for order or chaos; and for accountability or not? They stand for chaos. They say they are Christians but they are working for the other guy. I still say Trump has horns under the hair.

Who Needs Statues

Who needs statues when you can legislate manslaughter. Another ill-wind has blown in from the South, the Graham-Cassidy Death Bill. Yet again, an attempt is made to end the lives of poorer Americans prematurely by withholding healthcare. This modest proposal has all the laundering expertise behind it of the cunning devils of Fox News. 

The techniques of distancing and deniability have been perfected. No one will be able to say Lindsey, "Cracker" Graham and his Louisiana side-kick actually killed anybody but they will have it this way. They sow the seeds of deprivation. The surplus population will inevitably diminish, in misery. Cracker and his colleagues all go to church. 

What do they pray for? May Jesus ride in on a cloud sooner rather than later and end it all. They only want to do their share in setting the stage for the apocalypse.

Dinner Conversation at the Bezos Home

"Honey, I bought Whole Foods."

Military School

When I was a kid the boys who got sent to military school either had fathers who were militarists or they were scarily screwed-up, out of control and likely to annihilate themselves or someone else. Donald Trump's father was not a militarist.

People wind up creating the world they believe in...

and the strength of their conviction is proportional to its insanity and insecurity, in compensation. So, the craziest, most pessimistic and fraught people can end up running everything. Evangelical Christians are our version of this. They believe in the apocalypse, that the end-times has an ejection feature and that they alone get to use it.

Let the Destruction (of Trumpism) Begin!

The election of Donald Trump was an unacceptable occurrence and it can't be an accident. He's too inappropriate to be random, as though his name was pulled from a hat, but must be the product of a system run amok, so sick that it has deliberately chosen the character of its demise to end the suspense. 

Never mind that the destruction of the culture was far from a fait accompli and that the breadth, depth and duration of Donald's dynastic misadventures have yet to be defined. It is plenty bad enough. We must start with the determination to see this crushed and work from there, to means and method.

I have plenty of ideas.

Yes, Master

The application of reason in Republican circles always seems to end in recommendations of cruelty. It makes me wonder what master they serve. Their premises, to me, are suspect.

Cowardly Trump Kowtow​s to Extremists

Trump is doing away with DACA, under the influence of racist weasel Jeff Sessions and the scumbag Attorney General of Texas and who knows who else--heartless slimeballs, all.

Fear Aggression

Preemption is most often the result of fear, an attack on an unlikely enemy as a way of coping with one's expectations, projections and suspicions. It's easily recognizable in dogs but now among Republicans. Trump is a cowering inferno of aggression, for this reason.

Responsible Parent/Addictive Parent

It has become clearer now how Republicans have been playing off Democrats like an alcoholic spouse and relying on them to hold the family together while they continue on their 50 year spending bender. They divert money from anything contributing to the family's well-being and shunt it compulsively into things that line their pockets and keep them in positions of power. 

The Power of Hate

Watch as Republicans tiptoe around the monster they've created and so often baited with hate. That attack dog, the core of crazy voters they depend on, is constantly hungry. The bullies are quaking in their boots. Paul Ryan passed a healthcare bill nobody wanted.

Only a dead-man-walking, McCain, could save us from the thing, dripping in blood, as the pack barked and snarled at the door. They are loose now, beyond the control of their trainers, looking for their accustomed red-meat and responding unpredictably to Trump.

Trump is their man. He tries to direct them to the targets he chooses, too stupid to be afraid and too degraded and disconnected to care--consequences of privilege. He assumes his safety with a shield of ignorance and relies on the powers of resentment and hate.

Trump Awkwardly Tries to Show Empathy

Deep down, Donald Trump thinks the people who got flooded in Texas are losers.

There Was No Flood in Texas

There was no flood in Texas. Don't you believe it. I want to see its birth certificate. Few things are more certain in life than the expertise of Texans in prying subsidies away from the federal government. Texans kept robber-baron practices alive, for reasons of Christian principle, longer than anyone else, which is to say it is still going on.

Texas is the preeminent spoiled child of American politics and sees the federal government as a reservoir of the mother's milk of disposable cash and political favoritism. The problem is: they tout fiscal conservatism, restraint, and shrinking government only because they want more for themselves, and it's increasingly hard to hide the lies.

So, they invent a flood, replete with a Hollywood treatment. Don't be fooled, citizens. There was no flood. It was all invented to suck more money from the federal government. FreebieWorks, a Koch-founded, "grass-roots" organization dedicated to eliminating legal impediments to the accumulation of wealth, is reportedly on the fence. 

It's a lot of federal spending but their interns are slobbering all over themselves at the sums being considered for relief and rebuilding knowing how the Kochs and their allies are positioned to make a mint, guaranteeing the interns will never have to work a real job. This is similar to the Great Recession and the Iraq War, in that regard.

 

As surely as every aging Texas oil baron will marry a bimbo, this is a scam.

Broken Bad

I think it's sinking in that a lot of the people who voted for Trump didn't do so unknowingly but because he's unqualified and a maniac. They wanted to blow things up not shake things up. We're about to find out how resilient our system really is.

Republicans Prepare to Persecute Children

Reports are that some grain of humanity in Donald Trump has kept him from repealing DACA, which allows the innocent children of illegal immigrants to go to school and have normal lives and not be chucked over the border like a stick of wood. In a typical Republican triumph of ideology and inhumanity, however, it will probably be repealed. 

Loathsome Ann Coulter and the Breitbart brownshirts and bullies are insisting the president pull the trigger on the little ones. Even Trump was a child once. Somehow that seems not to be true for the hardliners. As always, the assumption is that they will never be treated as they want to treat others--that they are exempt from the cruelty.

Retribution by Trump

Once in a while I'll stumble onto a post on some conservative website and be floored by the hatred and irrationality. It is truly horrifying. The right-wing has had its way in America for decades and is sabotaging the government and systematically disenfranchising Democrats and especially the poorer, more ethnic and diverse populations they represent and yet somehow these hapless and powerless people get blamed.

Fox News and all the other objectifiers and hate-mongers are at work here. But Democrats have taken working people for granted and their contempt for cultural conservatives is obvious. Working people, as most others, will not respect someone in any context if they don't fight back when kicked in the teeth. Hillary couldn't reach them. Few Democrats can with their deracinated, bland, seemingly convictionless spiel. 

Say what you will about Republicans, they have an incredible drive to win. And a drive to screw everyone but the rich, wreck the country and ensure there is never any accountability for their crimes. The post I read recounted a Trump voter's rationale for his continuing support which was retribution. All he wanted was to get back at the left. He said so explicitly and, I will say, with eloquence and venom. But for what?

It's bizarre, since the left hasn't had their way for decades but that's where the lies, hate-mongering and tribalism of Fox and other conservative media come in. Still, Democrats won't fight back. They want to play nice. Fuck that. It gets construed by everyone as a lack of courage and conviction. It's time to fight back. Donald Trump is president and Americans can't even tell right from wrong any more. What does it take?

God Declares Texas Spiritual Disaster Area

Good job, God. Texas is an epicenter for more than flooding, being a proud home of the prosperity gospel and mega-churches with pastors living in mansions. By their logic and that of the climate deniers Texas has been decreed spiritually corrupt and unfit. Repent, Texans, once you've swum to safety. 

Cut Taxes and Deregulate Everything Miracles Will Occur

Ted Cruz had better be scrambling around trying to find some money to rebuild Texas. The points of light are all shorted out by now, I'm sure, in the areas affected by Hurricane Harvey. Tight-fisted Ted, always accusing everyone else of raiding federal funds, including victims of Hurricane Sandy, will be walking around with his palms upraised. 

Deregulate and cut taxes, that's what I say. Surely a private sector miracle will rebuild Texas for everyone, rich and poor alike, just as Republicans have been claiming for decades in relation to the national economy. Some of us are still waiting on that miracle but Texas is special and not to be messed with, as they are always anxious to assert. 

Good luck, boys. 

Texas Parade Float Massacre

Let's say you're one of those moronic, corrupt, climate-denying, Trump-voting, evangelical, so-called Christians from Texas whose life is now underwater. How ya' liking your apocalypse? Have you seen Jesus riding by on a parade float? Or, maybe, Sarah Palin? Elvis? 

Rejoice, idiot. The end is near.

Donald Will Never Stop Playing the Dick Card

He thinks it got him where he is. Being born incredibly rich got him where he is. Donald was an outsider and regarded as an upstart and a boor in New York. He's incapable of learning from this because he isn't acting like a dick he is a dick. He can't behave any other way. 

I Do Renounce Satan

Almost every group and faction has an institutional memory of being a minority or being oppressed. Christians can recall many such episodes beginning with the life of Jesus. Jesus was, after all, executed. Christians ought to think twice about capital punishment for this reason alone but of course they love it and now they are increasingly applying their sadism in other ways to average, innocent citizens, deliberately exempting the rich. 

I'm speaking of evangelicals here. Power necessarily entails responsibility. There were arguments in the Bush years about where he ranked among incompetent presidents. The question biases the answer, in Bush's favor. Bush's trainwreck presidency has to be viewed in relation to America's power at the time and its ability to do good or evil. Bush and America had a responsibility to ourselves and the world and it was an epic failure. 

Many people, including me, thought the election of Obama was a tacit admission of our sins and a kind of penance through realignment. Evangelical, so-called Christians however weren't having it. It is clear now they regard their alliance with Satan--Donald Trump--as a strategic move. But they aren't holding their noses and nobody partners with the devil. In dealings with the devil the devil always runs the show. Their souls are well sold. 

We have responsibilities inherent in our success and are fleeing from them headlong. We have the power of cultural adults and the consciences of infants. Who better to embody this than Trump, the deceiver. I thought Bush was the nadir--that it couldn't get any worse without complete societal collapse. Maybe we are there and we have evangelical, ersatz Christians to thank more than anyone. They have abdicated any sense of morality. 

Kelly Consolidates Power

Another high-level nutcase is out at the White House, a further indication that General Kelly might be able to establish order short of the instability and incompetence of the president himself. This only distracts from the main point, that Republicans have sabotaged and gerrymandered the government out of existence. It exists and it doesn't, being an illegal version of itself and so in some ways worse than whatever the result of an outright coup or overthrow might be.

Then the old ideals would probably be intact and the lines of disagreement would be clear. Now it is all confusion as Republicans market a bogus, illegitimate and ersatz version of Americanism to a susceptible, lazy and less than well-informed public. Failures and shortcomings are inevitable and it's no news to anyone that Americans have never lived up to their ideals or even the terms of their own laws and founding documents. But this is something different.

The ideals themselves are largely gone, lost in a torrent of Republican lies. Kelly's legitimization of Trumpism is the worst thing that can happen, Trump representing not just a challenge but the complete inversion of the American ethos. Democrats are fighting the transgender wars--maybe the final, ignominious battle in their complete defeat, alienating even true believers in the party with the incredible strategic stupidity of the effort. Trump is baiting them along.

Trump Pardons Fellow Asshole

Donald Trump has pardoned Joe Arpaio, another guy who thinks he is above the law and that he answers to no one. Both men bound themselves to certain duties, in oaths of office. They then ignored the vows and did what they wanted. Each man seems to enjoy power, conflict and cruelty as ends in themselves. 

Who Gets the Mantle

You will never convince me there aren't huge father issues at the heart of our darkness. All the recent Republican candidates for the presidency--running to be the national dad--have had very powerful fathers against whom, presumably, they were unconsciously weighing and finding themselves wanting. And then there were Obama and Clinton, who came from nothing.

Republicans wanted to destroy them before they were even in office. They were the usurpers, the false daddies, not because they weren't competent but because they were, thereby challenging the advantages of privilege. It operates independently of competence. Witness George Bush, being rehabilitated as we speak, a man of inconceivable functional worthlessness.

But he's our national dolt and so we find ways to try to like him to spare ourselves an audit of his crimes. They are our crimes now and the most important thing is to avoid a reckoning. And notice how this corresponds with Calvinism and its arbitrary form of salvation. It must be shown that good works never get you anywhere, so Calvinists are reassured by incompetence.

Everything is about luck, inheritance and the self-justifications of wealth and worldly success, the opposite of the founding ethos of the American State, whose originators knew the failures of primogeniture, hereditary rule and unaccountable authority. So there's a social corollary to these individual problems, what group among our generation gets to run the show.

The New Manichean Nation

America's fatal flaw is its self-righteousness. Everything ultimately gets distilled into an overly simplified frame of reference with a known result--we are always the good guys.

Salk vs. The Bomb

It's no wonder Americans are ambivalent about science. On the one hand, there's Salk. Characteristically, we overreacted--thinking there would be a cure, or vaccine, for everything from bursitis to bipolar disorder. 

On the other hand there's Hiroshima, my friend, and the implication of planetary annihilation. Again, typically, we failed to employ dialectical, rational and integrative thinking, preferring the bipolar route over balance. 

We insist on either utopian optimism and idealism or fear and despair. We can't think clearly about anything because we aren't thinking at all, having reverted to tribalism in everything, even science. It's utterly un-American.