License to Lie

We can see now how well the Trumpian political brand, bullshit, melds with the new Republicanism, trending for decades to a lack of candor, transparency. legitimacy and competence. So much of it has to do with permission, working mostly subliminally.

Be the worst you can be. Trump and his political faction represent the sanction to hate, to lie, to steal, to insult and disenfranchise fellow citizens, and to uproot and annihilate the shredded American ethos of decency. Remember, we used to stand for something.

Shun Someone Today

My favored treatment for Sarah Sanders would be the ducking stool, plunging her into the Potomac on a charge of being excessively argumentative. Shunning is much too easy on her. However, in these tough times when "conservatives" have an alternative universe of lies to flee to I'll take a solid shun, to which Sanders was subjected recently.

In a more fair world her children would be snatched from her and detained out-of-state. Sanders and her political movement have been conditioned to assume there are never any consequences. There weren't even in the case of the criminal Bush regime which killed hundreds of thousands of people. I know, first we must have justice for Hillary.

What are war crimes in comparison with using a private email server in the service of one's country? Not that Bush and his crew didn't do more of that than Hillary, of course. This is the fundamental, racist, illegal and unconstitutional precept of the modern Republican Party, that there are arbitrarily different standards for different groups of people.

I Think We're Alone Now

America isn't isolationist it's isolated. Who wants anything to do with a bully? We assume whatever we are it is the best and better than everyone else.

We are the chosen people. Self-chosen, that is, a nation notable now only as the assholes of the world, an island of sociopathic greed and cruelty.

Winding Down

I have been deciding to wind down my life a little early, not that I have any plans or desire to die. Neither have I previously had the intention to withdraw from work or any of my other activities but I think I will now, because, why bother? The old pursuits seem pointless. For so many of us there is the awareness that we have been taking too much for granted thinking we lived in a sane, rational, somewhat fair, humane and sustainable democracy.

All of that is gone with the wind and burned to ashes. Not only have we failed to live up to our image of ourselves, it is so extreme it's not possible to believe we were ever the people we thought we were. We have lost our past, present and future, like a romance that ends so badly it discredits what you thought you once had. Even the good memories are tainted. Trump and his supporters have ended the illusion. The American romance is over.

An American Madman

Look at the most recent pictures of Trump. This is the face of a madman, those jowls slurring words in their smack of orange and spewing incoherence menacingly at the behest of a hostile, seething, malicious brain.

Soul Sacrifice: a Tragedy in Two Acts

Act One: Southern Baptists sell themselves to Satan to maintain an apartheid, terrorist rule in the American South with religious sanction.

Act Two: Republicans, using the Southern Strategy, mortgage their souls to these evangelical agents of doom for power and political success.   

In the end the Devil collects the debt. Payment is made in souls. America declines into a predatory and misanthropic political and cultural wasteland.

This is the story of the lost souls of America, resulting in the moral, ethical and spiritual destruction of the society. Many innocent lives were lost.

Many lives were ruined. All for nothing.

What's My Lie?

Swirling around the drain in their vortex, I want to make a case for better quality lies.

Republicans have gotten lazy and careless. Individual, lying creativity is perishing in the corporatization of deceit. They corporatize everything. Why not the prevailing social movement of our times: indirection, obfuscation, denial, distortion and duplicity?

Why bother being original when you have already won? With that in mind and the trend in reality entertainment up to the level of the White House, I recommend initiating a new game show to recognize and reward individual excellence in lying, What's My Lie?

How to Feel Sick

Want to feel sick? Recall and review all the pain inflicted on the country by Republicans in the last 20 years and think how unjustified it has been at the polls. More Americans voted against George Bush than for him in 2000. More Americans voted against Trump.

Decent people, in this situation, would have acknowledged the necessity of trying to reflect that negative mandate and shown some respect for the electorate. Instead these scumbag “winners” have shown nothing but contempt and opportunism.

Worse yet the Bushies, apart from botching their response to 9/11 in relation to national security and preparedness, used the tragedy to aggressively put through partisan measures having nothing to do with security, such as catastrophic tax cuts and deregulation.

And now we have Trump and his obsessive recklessness. They have to keep the insanity at fever-pitch for fear Americans will have a moment of clarity and see how they have been betrayed and screwed, finally rejecting the abomination.

Dancing Queen

Donald is the dancing queen, grooving-out in front of us all, ever the center of attention and craving praise. 

Cue it, ABBA. Shake it, Donald. It's forever Friday night at Donald's house. Rich people make their own rules.

True Shit

Blink. Just blink. Don't think. Look at what we are now, the land of Donald Trump.

Sinful Nature

Ivanka Trump and the White House have announced a line of aromatics, essences, colognes, perfumes, incenses, room deodorizers and vapes designed to help Americans get over their problems of despair at witnessing the dissolution of our society, the loss of its traditions and principles and the descent into madness. The line is called Sinful Nature.

An array of products has been engineered to produce feelings and attitudes of calm and compliance in the face of threats and instability. Ivanka has lived with this all her life, watching her father stumble from one misguided impulse to another, oblivious to the effect it has on his family. She has found that olfactory therapy helps her to survive. 

Visit the White House website for further information and to make purchases. The products have been tested on prisoners and detainees and, while not guaranteed to be safe, have helped participants in these trials withstand mental and physical abuse with greater serenity and grace. Their hideous cries were reduced to whimpers and groans.

Also, it made it easier for those applying the screws to continue with their work. Screaming and shrieks of anguish can hamper the most committed and hardened technician. They can't have that happening among the enforcers, a few of whom have been unreasonably affected recently by children weeping incessantly after being ripped from their parents. 

CALM DOWN, everyone. Enjoy an essence or a vape. It's probably not going to be okay but there's nothing you can do about it. All proceeds will be funneled through the Trump family's charity. Wait, that is being investigated. In any case, revenues are allocated to help build that beautiful, incredible, great and amazing WALL we have all been waiting for. 

Trump’s Asshole

Previously I have felt it wouldn't be fair, in an administration so rife with corruption, ill-will and incompetence, to choose a champion jerk but I think we have a winner in Trump-world, Stephen Miller. Steve Bannon is well gone and Jeff Sessions, I think, is his own asshole, so there you have it.

Miller's quiet presence has asserted itself in the unspeakable, deliberately confrontational, sadistic and viciously inhumane separation of children from their illegal-immigrant parents, who are fleeing problems mostly of OUR unowned responsibility. We have ruined any chance their countries had at functional government with our limitless demand for illegal drugs and in other, interfering ways. 

Stephen, congratulations. You are Trump’s asshole. Relish the experience. This is an honor that will go with you to your grave, may that be sooner rather than later, you unforgivable, reeking pile of garbage.

Republicans and Self-Fulfilling Expectations

People end up creating the world they believe in. You have to hope that most are rooted enough in reality to help create a world that makes sense. Not so with Republicans, of course, whose denial of reality is only the beginning. Their substitute is so sick and cynical it encourages a world of brutality and exploitation.

There are MANY examples of this but seeing a terrified two-year-old crying in horror as her mother is frisked by ICE agents I couldn't blame anyone, identifying with or pitying the child or the mother, for hating America and everything it stands for. Similarly, George Bush reassured Muslims of their worst fears about America. 

But, behold. There are Muslims as greedy, fucked-up and cynical as the Bushes and their successors, the Trumpists, who are outdoing even the the Bush crowd in their viciousness and greed. The Saudis and some other Arabs are coming around to this apocalyptic way of doing business. Fuck everyone else. Fuck the future. 

Grab everything you can and try to screw any potential rivals or justice-seekers into a permanent state of impotence. It's the American way, man. 

Behold the Blitz

At some point you have to step back and regard Republican corruption with awe. They say that's what happened to people who lived through the London blitz--that many of them lost all fear, became immersed in their powerlessness and passivity, and marveled at the display of mindless destruction.

False Witness

There are at least two kinds of false witness, deliberately misreporting something someone has seen and reporting about something someone has not seen. In the case of Jeff Sessions, Sarah Huckabee Sanders and others citing biblical authority for persecuting children I think it is safe to say they have never truly glimpsed the transformation of the love of Christ in their hearts and minds.

I can't condemn them personally, only their behaviors. But they have, in effect, condemned themselves. For the other kind of false witness turn on the TV and tune it to Fox News. There, day after day, events are miscast in a consistent and systematic way, tearing down feelings of trust in individuals and institutions to the benefit of those seeking, always, more money and power.

It's interesting that Fox is doing just what the Russians have been doing in their attempts to undermine our democracy and weaken our resolve. They create increasing division, confusion and polarization.

Reason to Believe

I think the refusal of the Democrats to fight effectively for their values shows they are true believers in the resiliency and long-term stability of our system of government. The assumption is now wrong. Voters construe it as a lack of commitment and investment.

Democrats come across as inept and ideologically weak. Republicans, on the other hand, are blindly convinced of their rightness in a tribal way. Democrats, it might be too late, but there is only one choice now: ATTACK, ATTACK, ATTACK.

The Friends of Destruction

Well, guess what. The Republican Party is now the party of Donald Trump. For several decades I have been haranguing people saying they didn't understand how crazy it was, that Republicans had become revolutionaries and an army of apostates determined to reinvent the country as something unrecognizable and profane, a new thing serving only the welfare of a fraction of its citizens. That time has come.

Republican masters and organizers are grazing in the grass and the rest of us are heading for the ditch. If you think it's bad now wait until they destroy the economy again. They always do--with profligacy, with greed and its enabling deregulation and with fiscal insanity. They deliberately squander resources to keep them out of the hands of the rabble. They enrich themselves and run away. The end is here.

First in Treason

The last will be first. Suckass South Carolina is the state to watch as the leading edge of the Confederate wave. There the electorate consistently votes for the most degraded candidate, determined now by loyalty to Trump. South Carolina is at the bottom--morally bankrupt and bereft of hope--but in the new world order of Trumpism that places it at the top, as the state most willing to sell its soul and destroy the Union. 

They did this once before. Remember?

Giving It Up For Glory

Trump went to Singapore with one goal, personal glory. He gave away the store for that.

Where Assholes Dare

All-asshole government is now the norm. Policies, procedures and pronouncements are chosen and selected for insult-effect.

It is a government of baiters, trolls and bullies.

The Abbreviated End Times

The Rolling Fuckwad Abbreviated World Tour, Shower of Insults, has slunk to Singapore after disgracing itself in Canada but it's the degradation, after all, that people pay to see. Everything else is so boring. Humanity looks on, breath abated.

The titular head of the free world and another murderous little monster will drill holes in one another's heads, prospecting for ego gratification. The rules, designed to prevent calamitous collateral damage, are suspended in the name of art.

Canada, Be Careful

Canadians, you have never before seen the kind of sociopathic scum represented by Trump, Bolton and Kudlow. For the uninitiated it is hard to understand. Be careful and stand by your leader. History will remember you well. 

Short Stop

Trump's problem with Trudeau is obviously that Trudeau is taller. And he's younger and better looking and not a flaming asshole like Donald but I think the height is what gets to him. Donald is a primal child.

Luckily, he goes off now to engage a fat, shorter dictator with a Hitler mustache on top of his head. Mutual sucking-up will undoubtedly ensue. Trump only deals well with people who don't answer to anyone.

People like himself.

Which Is Harder?

Which is harder, to comprehend what a piece of shit Donald Trump is or the acquiescence and complicity of the entire Republican substate and bureaucracy to his agenda, if we can call it that, of depravity and criminal indifference to the responsibilities of his position? I can't get my head around any of it.

Crescendo of Corruption

Seeing the crescendo of corruption reached by Trump's anti-administration it’s possible to look back and view more clearly the roots of our demise in the southern strategy, through which Republicans sold their souls for political victories, initially trusting in the rightness of their absurd doctrines and keeping up a semblance of statesmanship.

Now Republicans compulsively cling to power and wantonly disgrace themselves, believing that the entire physics of accountability has been overturned. It hasn't but it is possible that they have successfully channelled the consequences of their corruption downstream onto innocent citizens of lesser means and generations of future victims.

This is how addiction works. The beasts must be fed no matter what. The economic rout of 2008 was an example, as the dust settled and income and wealth became concentrated even more. The retributive social anger and indecency of the southern contingent of Republicans is now on full view in Jeff Sessions, Scott Pruitt and others.

Sessions routinely advances the thinly rationalized persecutory agenda of the Confederacy against minorities and working people, Pruitt showing the utter decomposition of (his) humanity brought about by the corrosive effects of racism on people's souls, the initial existence of which these loathsome actors begin to call into question.  

Our Achilles (Heel)

Trump is our Achilles, withholding himself from battle--every rational challenge we face--while sulking in self-pity.

He represents our need to feel right no matter how badly we behave. Do you see why the evangelicals love him? 

In their eyes he was CHOSEN, obviously not having succumbed to the heresies of good works and self-determination.

He has never had a decent impulse in his life. Rather, he is evidence of the irrationality and inscrutability of election.

That such a hopeless shit-pile should be the recipient of such gifts must be a manifesting of God's will. So, there.

It was our destiny--the destiny of annihilation, the thing evangelicals have always longed for anyway. Make ready.

The end-times are here.

Disaster Prepped by Bushes

Let us not forget, witnessing Donald Trump's heroically bottomless, infantile ego and self-centeredness, that it has been foreshadowed by Bushes and other failures for years.

Assumptions of privilege obtain: there will be no accountability, practitioners of their dark arts are exempt from judgement, and they are right by birth and association.

How they act is irrelevant.

One Mississippi...

Whatever happened to the old ways of a place like Mississippi, where structural violence, woven into the social fabric, resulted in a kind of peace? The structures and values--the idolatry of property and privilege--were successfully transplanted to Washington. 

Democrats are the new black underclass, technically enfranchised but effectively powerless. Even in electoral victory Democrats are prevented from having a a voice. The occasional, real success, like Obamacare, becomes a point of unhinged, primal antipathy.

Yes, we are living in the Confederacy. I never expected the actual transformation from racist shithole to responsible society to be easy but I thought the superego of the commonwealth, as displayed in the early days of civil rights, would guarantee eventual progress.

In some number of generations racial animus would be rare. Integration would be natural. But the southern states have always voted for a racist agenda, especially since the insult of desegregation. Yankees are naïve, self-absorbed and insufficiently motivated. 

As happened before in the South, this corrupt system will fail. Mississippian Haley Barbour has peddled influence in Washington with immense success and played the benign "massa" back home. Privilege is ensconced again everywhere. The plantations are back.

Our economy is based on exploitation, masked because of internationalism, overall wealth and new technologies. Risks move downwards, to average citizens. Rewards accrue upwards into the hands of an over-rewarded class contemptuous of everyone else.

The countdown to our reckoning begins: one Mississippi...

Chaos Theory

My thinking on the Trump administration is that it is a feckless, chaotic, predatory mess of corruption motivated by greed and compulsions to domination and triumphalist displays of cruelty. Add to this self-righteousness and a sense of destiny provided by the evangelicals and it is a recipe for the end of life as we know it.

The Medium is a Mess

Social Media is a monster. Undeniably, some of its innocent, low-level effects are good but, overall, the connectedness now dominates the entities being connected. Egotism, even in its more innocuous forms, is eventually self-negating. Secure, happy people don't need it. They crave a less widely distributed, higher quality of intimacy, not a kind of fame.

A Life in Irony

I am right behind the nucleus of the baby-boom and it is an amazing place to be, spending your entire life so near (maybe a 32nd beat away) to an ictus in a thundering pulse of iambic activity, subsumed as an imperceptible technicality. Provided, in any event, you don't subscribe to their ethos of mindless self-centeredness. 

I do not. It is a view up the ass-end of the greatest display of selfishness ever at a closely uncomfortable distance. Boomers will make their exit having raped and looted the past and mortgaged the future, possibly of the entire world and forever, their greed reaching beyond the shores and bounds of the wealthiest nation in history. 

Does anyone believe that Donald Trump is an accident or an aberration? He is the swine king, a high priest of decadence and lord of the fairways from which the boomers will be raptured in a haze of viagra and other drugs. They have had allies in this. Souls are always for sale in certain markets. There the slaves auction themselves.

Revival tents come to mind. Specimens of this generational catastrophe may be viewed, self-segregated, in the gated golf-communities. We should lock them in. They have locked us out, and we deserve protection. The baleful effects of the boomers are inescapable. Trump testifies to that. Whatever they have it is never enough.

Strangers in Paradise

How is it that the New Jerusalem of the evangelical Christians so resembles a mafia outpost, fascist puppet state, prison or plantation? One of these incredibly evil people, a preacher named Jeffress--a charlatan, bigot and slimeball of Falwellian egotism, moral presumption and ethical obtuseness--has spoken pridefully at the opening of the (our) new embassy in Jerusalem.

Palestinians were slaughtered in celebration, a curious offering to the real gods of the hucksters and hawkers of bogus salvation--used-car salesmen billed as saviors. Their gods are their own ambition and conceit. For many of them (see "Swaggart") the laying-on-of-hands has led them into the arms of prostitutes and young women and men, and into the pockets of the unsophisticated poor. 

What the hell--God has chosen winners and losers. Isn't it godlike to do the same? Look hard at the audacity and arrogance of that and try to reconcile it with anything found in the Bible. Try to reconcile their vast fortunes and mega-churches with anything like the life of Christ. But don't do it for too long because they are coming after you. Prepare to defend yourselves. 

They are after your jobs, healthcare, retirement and anything else they can take. And they think they are the agents of God's will in this, purifying the world through fire, the sword and Paul Ryan. Purifying you, that is. They are already saved and don't need it. Funny how that works. We are strangers in their paradise, illegal inhabitants of a sectarian utopia and subject to deportation.

The Apocalypse Smiles Back

Finally, I am making my peace with the end-times. Until now my apathy has been enforced by powerlessness as I longed for a restoration of rational, constitutional rule. In my dreams I was a Karl Rove of the left, an über-effective, behind-the-scenes guy driving the rogues out of town, then resting on my rotting laurels in a cushy think tank somewhere.

What ever happened to tar and feathers? Consider those deserving to be ridden out of Washington on a rail and chucked over a boundary into a gated retirement, possibly in prison. Why bother anymore. The Gingrichers are leaving anyway or gone. The corruption of the government--the thing they longed for in the first place--is accomplished.

Newt was always a standing insult to decency. Now he skulks around the Vatican under the skirts of his wife. Her only qualification for ambassadress was adultery, the structural perversion, insolence and impiety of that a fitting culmination. Meanwhile, new recruits in their places man the galleys and engine rooms of an already pirated ship. 

The destination--annihilation--has been pre-programmed into its system. The crew have all been schooled, indoctrinated, and sworn to ideological steadfastness. They too will perish but fatalists don't care. We are stuck with them. Why fight it anymore? Our helplessness is perfect and complete. I have smiled at the apocalypse and it is smiling back. 

Chasing the Parvenus: the Conservative Cult and the Ascent of the Lie

In the hands of Republican rogues lies have become ends in themselves. Incoherence is incarnated in chaos, despair and social disintegration. The word "conservative" itself is a lie. Conservativism is a cult. Obedience is essential and unanimity is required. Dissent is not tolerated.

The doctrines and the repository of accepted opinions, embedded in code language and doublespeak, change daily. Followers tune-in to Fox News to be reprogrammed in real time. Submission is expected and incoherent opinions result in incoherent people. Integrity is abandoned.

In the absence of an agreed-upon cult leader and coherent beliefs the followers look outward and are unified only by antipathy and aggression. It is a religion of hatred and fear. There must be enemies. Fox News and all the enmity are now mirrored perfectly in the White House.

Elusive Butterflies of Bullshit

Words and stuff emerge from Trump's mouth and the political machine surrounding him--enablers, underlings and assorted opportunists. These butterflies--the edicts, tweets and whatever--are uncatchable by hand and there are so many of them. I am drawing close to some of them now.

Wait, they aren't butterflies at all but miniature predator drones disguised. They are miniature drones of destruction, reducing reason, integrity and intelligibility to mush and madness. Trump and his evil forces create confusion and despair. They instill hatred, mistrust and envy.

And those little drones are weaponized. The lies are ready to defend themselves.

Animal Drives

Since Americans have given up on their ethics and openly extol living like pigs I wanted to look inside that movement and see if there is a hierarchy there, and substructures and differentiation. Previously, as an outsider to the sty, I had approached it as a monolith, regarding it as an odd, aboriginal, anachronistic alt-culture, something mostly abandoned with the evolutionary growth of a prefrontal cortex, writing, literacy, and all the arts, traditions and technologies usually known as "civilization."

How naïve I was. I never wittingly chose to enter the sty but it has encompassed all of us in a kind of psychological, suburban sprawl of filth. The sprawl is now affecting the physical environment in an unprecedented and bad way, the conundrum of consciousness requiring that human beings be either more or less than animals. We can't choose to be exclusively animals again and exit the territory of the morality of consciousness, the subject of many myths such as the story of Adam and Eve in the Garden of Eden.

Anyway, we have tried to deny our humanity and return to an idealized natural state, an impossibility. The first distinction I see among the swine is between determinists and romantics. Determinists argue that our animal nature is inescapable and should therefore be embraced and indulged. Dog eat dog. That, of course, is the inverse of the reality--that our humanity and uniqueness in the animal kingdom is a fact--and the argument is therefore reductive, circular and self-negating. We are singular in our power, if nothing else.

The romantics believe the sty is an appropriate place to inhabit and that it doesn't stink--a tenet and creed belied by a perceptible pungency. They wallow in the muck with abandon, inured to the stench. A romantic outlook can be a beautiful thing if it is rooted in reality. But all the lies, infighting and perversion evident in the shitshow reveal the truth of its squalor. So, the romantics believe that the sty is not inevitable but that it is our due. Evangelical Christians are romantics. Trumpists are among the determinists. 

True Trumpists are greed mavens and money-men--followers, formally or not, of Ayn Rand's hideous doctrines. Nothing in her cynical, incoherent work deserves to be called theoretical. Evangelicals, such as Sarah Sanders, compare creation to some fantasy of godly perfection and therefore expect the sty and roll around in it happily, not realizing it is their degraded creation and not God's. I have to go now and wipe the slime from my eyes. I will be back and report further on the awful mess we have fallen into.

Carrion Consciousness

This is what it feels like to be a corpse--a corpse of a country. The vultures show up out of nowhere. And there are so many of them. What a thing to witness.

Rudy Will Get His Lies Straight

Donald Trump has come out in support of his bumbling, incompetent counsel, Rudy Giuliani. He knows Rudy has his heart in the right place--loyalty before conscience, a reverence for authority, and a conviction that power is its own justification.

Donald knows Rudy will get his lies straight. It was lot to master on short notice.

Apocalypse Soon

Some shill and henchman of the apocalypse, an intimate of Trump, has reported he has never seen Herr Donald lie, only exaggerate. His interviewer expressed due amazement.

Be not amazed. These are not lies or even a web of lies but a delusional system, familiar to those with experience of paranoia. To get there the Trumpists give up on their humanity. 

No big deal, in certain circles.

Real psychopaths can't help it. Ours are mostly sociopaths, narcissists, greed-monsters and children of privilege. Their own sins are revealed in the accusations and insults they hurl.

Those apply to themselves. Back at you, Donald. It is necessary, to begin to understand it, to give up on reality. It will drive you crazy if you don't. Oddly, it must be appreciated as art.

It is the art of the end-times.

The Big Creep

I recall once a use of the word "you" that stunned me, coming from a German expat who worked mostly in Africa. It wasn't personal and individual, but a collective use, referring to me as an American and wondering how "we" could have resoundingly reelected the obviously rogue, illegal, incompetent government of George W. Bush after witnessing the destruction he and his hoodlums had caused already.

The damage was clearly still building to its climax in economic collapse and international military and diplomatic humiliation, so maybe we were only dancing with the girl we came with, out of a sense of honor or some other misguided, idiotic, chivalric try at consistency driven by vanity and false pride of a playground level of sophistication. Whew, I'm glad we survived that! It was an aberration!

Not so fast. Enter Trump.

Perhaps we would still like to think "we" are good people at heart and mean well but it isn't going to fly anymore--not since Trump, and reasonably much sooner. The level of denial involved in the conviction that we aren't represented by the actual, murderous, grotesquely brutish effects of our elected government is too great to stomach and suicidally addictive in its severity. It is as epic in its aspect as it is cowardly. 

It requires a level of dissociation worthy of the Taliban and other such groups that embrace the inevitable dishonor of a personal code of narrow, tribal focus, raping and murdering at will in the name of some assumption of a divine mandate. How are we different? We aren't anymore and Trump proves it. Donald is representative of us. No protest is enough. It never should have happened and "we" can't disown it.

Madness to the Method

There is madness to the method of Republicans. There is no rational goal, endpoint or outcome. Rather, they employ fanatical tactics to win battles in a war they will inevitably lose. Somebody tell them, we are all on the same side. You can't win by fighting yourselves and sabotaging the system that got you there.

Gag Economy

American workers, deemed not so much unworthy as replaceable and irrelevant by the capitalists, are being throttled and gagged. Watch for it, parallel worlds of powerlessness and plenty. The workers are so stripped of influence the capitalists don't even see them. Working people have no voice at all. And the parasites only grow stronger.

The Revolution Will Not Be Televised

Actually, it was, but we were watching so much other stuff at the same time we mistook it for entertainment. Better luck next time!

Fly Me to the Moon

We're living among lunatics. We might as well do it in an appropriate setting.

To Be Is Not To Be

We wake up every morning to an unimaginable reality. Donald Trump, possibly the most selfish, loathsome human being ever, has been elected President. Every day he proves his worthlessness.

I feel certain no one could foresee how horrible he would be. Some modicum of competence and decency might have been inferred from his circumstances and milieu. That would have been a mistake.

There is no competence and no decency. Donald Trump is a piece of garbage. A shocking percentage of Americans still support him. Shame on them. Dissociation is our shield and protection.

We walk around in a cloud of unknowing, bowing to the impossibility of articulating our corruption. Facing it would mean a catastrophic collapse of our collective sense of self. To be is not to be.

Wings of Despair

I am an angel. I have an announcement—or a message, if you prefer. We, the angels, don't usually transmit messages directly anymore. We help to maintain God’s connection with His creation in other ways. But you have pushed us too far. We are at the end of our tether.

Angels are a lot less imperfect than humanity but still a far cry from God, if you get my drift. Assuming nothing, I’ll spell it out. God is very, VERY far removed from humanity in His power and perfection. Still, the connection is indissoluble and no more tenuous for the distance. Granting that, it is very unwise for humanity to presume on God’s beneficence.

It is very unwise for humanity to take God’s good-will for granted. Frankly we, the angels, are sick of having our own reserves of compassion unnecessarily drained and depleted trying to make up for humankind’s rebellion against and chronic perversion of the will of God. 

Please stop. God will not intervene if you choose to destroy yourselves.

You are making it too hard for us to do our job. We love you. God loves you. But what kind of idiots think it is acceptable to plunder God's creation? The "dominion" conferred by God unto humanity wasn't a license to destroy the world. It was a declaration of responsibility.

At that you are failing. Get a fucking clue. 

Scott Pruitt

Pruitt has been added to my list, together with George Bush and Hannity, of likely examples of the later-life effects of Fetal Alcohol Syndrome or some other gestational disaster, based on their behaviors and that troubling, "nobody home" look in their eyes.

As a Democrat I believe in taking care of everybody. Therefore, I argue against putting them in prison because we are implicated in their atrocities by not having isolated them earlier in a fitting institutional setting, such as an asylum for the criminally insane.

There is no excuse for not pulling the plug on them now, considering that someone like Bush, even in retirement, might inspire budding sociopaths to conclude that they inhabit a culture without any accountability at all, encouraging socially harmful behaviors.

In other words, we will have more depraved, degraded, destructive people like Scott Pruitt running around who are not content to stew in their own hellhole of anger and ignorance but feel compelled to inflict themselves on the rest of us and control everything.

This is a fundamental problem, that in conditions of relative security, when normal people choose to enjoy their lives and embrace measures to ensure continuing contentment, others like Pruitt do the opposite. Fear causes them to sow the seeds of discord.

Scott’s secure phone-booth is symbolic. Like so many Republicans his entire psychology is defined by fear. They must have enemies. In their absence they invent them.

Trump Tunes

Trump's administration is so cartoonishly corrupt it stands as its own indictment. It’s not a matter for analysis but for observation. The way to try to comprehend it, then, is to picture them all as cartoon characters, the treatment as normal humans being highly prejudicial in favor of, well, normalcy.

There’s nothing normal about it. That's all, folks!

A New Utah

We need a new Utah, a place to concentrate evangelical Christians and limit the damage they do, as the Mormons are concentrated in Utah. I want to say it would be a dystopia of gun ranges, shoot-outs, roaming militias and Trump-fests, with public hangings every day or two and a red-light district unrivaled in the world, but I know otherwise.

I bet it would be a pretty tranquil place and look a lot like Salt Lake City in its renamed capital, Redeemer or Christopolis, because minorities and Muslims would choose to live elsewhere, ending the anxiety over the threat of the takeover of Sharia Law. Similarly the "gay agenda" would be laid to rest and marriage would again only be between one man and an indeterminate number of women to be specified at a later date. 

There would be a constrained and circumscribed kind of peace. Revival-tent religion will be merged with NASCAR, using the same venues.

It isn't that evangelicals don't want to take care of anybody--they don't want to take care of anyone but themselves. Think of the Taliban and remember that they have a certain appeal, notwithstanding an occasional stoning or unsurgical hand or head removal. They get stuff done and provide services and structure in really screwed-up places. Rest assured, they will grow no opium in Graceland, or whatever they call it, and sightings of Elvis will abound.

Black people will just live elsewhere. Muslims will stay the hell away. Catholics will convert or hold their masses in secret, as they did when evangelicals outlawed their religion in Ireland. Non-conformers of all stripes might be pitied as apostates, heathen and unbelievers have been forever, as pariahs and outcasts, provided they remain meek and powerless.

That is, the ones that survive the hangings, which are not negotiable. There are limits to the good-will and mercy of evangelicals. Hangings are a manifestation of divine justice and promote social unity and respect for the Lord's earthly dominion. The principles employed by the evangelicals themselves in disenfranchising Democrats will apply--that by concentrating the voting bloc their political power will be limited. 

The rest of the country can then return to its normal, rational existence and respect the rules of its founding. 

Do Fanboys Dream of Eccentric Creeps?

Vicarious living is a new hallmark of life in America. In an unrooted, touristy existence people seek stability and security through identification and investment in what they falsely perceive as more authentic and primally meaningful modes of being, I guess, like aggression and warfare.

Nerds and others satisfy mojo deficits in video games and fantasies of combat. Their less delusional peers are content with a decent job and thus gloat a little, inwardly, at the realization of their “revenge” against the more popular and adroit persons of their school-years’ acquaintance.

They feel vindicated. Compensation is what it is all about.

Feeling big, important and effective is what it is all about. Lacking it from within and, suspecting they are losers, they try to acquire it by association, sometimes if not often with other mortal beings and their aggregations. They engage in fandom, allegiance and tribal apprenticeship.

Jeez, it’s so submissive and pathetic. Can’t they see it? This is where geeks meet the likes of Paul Ryan and Mitch McConnell, whose aggression and fantasies of superiority mask the reality of lives spent dependently sucking off the government. They both ended up marrying rich women.

In that their real characters are revealed. Their legacies are destruction and vandalism, wrecking the things that the grownups built, unconsciously trying to find their power but ultimately expressing only resentment. Who cares, except that the damage they have done is so immense.