I once postulated parallels between Irish and Southern literature, having thought I noticed similarities in style and use of language.That is, language as a defense and means of keeping a defeated culture alive. The Irish were defeated by the English and the practice of their religion, Catholicism, was forbidden.
Southerners were defeated by the Yankees and their religion, virulent institutional racism, was made illegal. Both cultures were or became adept at making up and maintaining parallel worlds that gave them positive identities, rallying points and a collective sense of self. But making shit up has a qualitative side.
Not all lies are created equal. Art is a kind of lie, as is anything creative and so life in general. Our lives are lies. We have to apply a layer of creativity to make life livable. I have problems with Catholicism but I'll take it over racism, and it was racism that produced the lies of Birtherism, another Lost Cause.
Donald Trump has released a video remembering his devoted but mentally ill follower Ashli Babbitt who got killed in Trump's attempt to overthrow the government, which he deems a reasonable sacrifice in a worthy effort. All Hail Trump!
Keeping tabs gets us nowhere and the road to hell is paved with feeling owed.
I once got accused of stirring stuff up. Playground misbehavior. Inciting disruption. With sometimes slightly destructive effects. I was guilty. I got punished. I wasn't a Bush or a Trump.
It first hit me that things might not work out for me, as I had always thought they would. when I was in my late twenties. That I might have trouble making a living. But I wasn't a Bush or a Trump.
Trump's instigations are obvious. Schoolyard quality--low, petty and disproportionate. Bush, on the other hand, was being rehabilitated. With the end of Afghanistan, maybe not so much.
Will Americans finally see Republicans for what they are?
Republicans continue to take a huge dump on democracy, taking a cue from the residue Trump left on the Resolute Desk and just about everywhere else he went.
Wall Street is against Biden's infrastructure package, it appears. And why not? What's in it for them? I say, fine, they have a right to be against anything they want. With one vote each at election time. Anything else is disenfranchising to the rest of us.
George Bush: Jesus means I can get hundreds of thousands of people killed, displace millions, never suffer any earthly consequences and still go to heaven. Jesus is great.
Ted Cruz: I can spend my life trying to fuck people over and fuck people up and feel wonderful about it. I placed my soul in Jesus's hands. A conscience is superfluous. Life is so much simpler.
Paul Ryan: From my kegger days in college as an Ayn Rand devotee all I wanted was to screw my fellow citizens. Jesus provides cover. As a Catholic it's a little different. I dissociate.
Josh Hawley: I'm a raging theocratic conservative. I had to deceive a bunch of idiot liberals in educational institutions to get where I am. Jesus gave me the strength and perseverance to do that.
Rand Paul: I don't give a shit about Jesus. As a second-generation racist asshole I'm more of a seasoned veteran. I don't wear Jesus on my sleeve but thank God for the idiot Evangelical voters.
Louie Gohmert: I was already stupid and morally blind. I turned to God for reassurance, not to get stupid and morally blind. God made me feel stupid is fine. I never look back.
Paul Gosar: I'm a bit of a psychopath so Jesus was a natural fit for me. Jesus can do no wrong by definition and neither can I since I'm above everyone else and their lives don't matter.
Dick Cheney: Fuck Jesus, but thank God for the moron Jesus voters. You can screw them sideways and they still vote for you and never see the truth. Darth Vader is my avatar. I think it's funny.
Newt Gingrich: I have a vestigial conscience, unlike most Jesus people. I have to improvise to keep it in check. So far, so good. Usually I get a new wife. I'm a Catholic now so more a 'God' person.
Madison Cawthorn: I was plagued by feelings of worthlessness and inadequacy. Jesus got me past that. Not the worthlessness, but the feeling. Praise Jesus and pass the ammunition!
George Bush surfaced to kick in a bit of his wisdom on Afghanistan. He looks demonic now. Ted Cruz, too. Then there are guys like Gohmert who have that vacancy in the eyes but still look human. We've become the Devil's playground. Courtesy of Republicans. Republicans calling themselves Christians. And Texas is gound zero for the infestation.
Racists are negatively defined. They aren't defined by what they are they're defined by what they aren't. It extends into all areas of their lives.
Trump still won't admit he got his ass kicked. The only reassurance to be had with Trump is that he's old and unhealthy. Maybe he'll just die. I don't say this to be mean. I say it to try to save lives.
I think there's hope the info gleaned from the incel movement about the incel movement will give us insights into conservatives and the habits of frustration generally. The frustration of unrecognized genius. The frustrations of having to dwell with lesser beings. The frustrations of watching lesser beings progress in life in ways that you can't.
Then there are the results. Seething resentment. Revenge fantasies. Delusions of sufficiency. Lots and lots of compensation. Conservatives are all about compensation, trying to make up for the void inside and feelings of insecurity by putting other people down and building yourself up, no matter how you have to degrade yourself to do it.
This, is the fundamental dilemma of conservatism. They have to make themselves lesser to feel better because, at a deeper level, they know their own worth.
Something interesting is going on at Fox News. A bit of a shakeout. Usually, they act like there is no tomorrow. Like there will never be a reckoning for their lies.
Some evidence is there for that. Bill O'Reilly walked away unscathed. Roger Ailes died wealthy and unmolested, a free man. But there's some ass-covering going on now.
Over COVID. What's up? Either they think there might be a reckoning or they think they have the libertarian dream state of exploitation so locked in they're taking it easy.
Celebrating by sparing a few lives. I suspect it's both but libertarians are cruel masters. They tolerate little dissent. That argues for a reckoning. They think they might be justice.
How they fear justice. A hardly mentionable possibility is that some of them have consciences. There's no evidence for that. I want to see some evidence.
Competition among Republicans for the Weekly Sack of Shit Award is always contentious. They continue to up their game and we have to leave efforts unrecognized that well deserve mention. This week it was a battle between Kevin McCarthy and Madison Cawthorn.
The lines were clear. McCarthy deserved consideration because the power of his position results in greater impact--the efficacy index--but Cawthorn grovels better than anybody and seems to go out of his way to do it, making him the clear shit-eating leader.
Madison's predecessor. Mark Meadows, went down on his knees before John Boehner before disgracing himself as a treasonous Trump hireling, making us wonder if they're still making moonshine in them North Carolina mountains or if they switched to meth.
Anyway, we're going with McCarthy this week for his Trump obeisance. He set up Nancy Pelosi by nominating two Trump supporters to an investigative committee when they should have been recused out of hand for their records of partiality, implication and ignorance.
Trump has no legal role in the government anymore. He never did but, when he was in office you could have made the case. This means McCarthy's gambit was more disenfranchising than the average Republican effort at negating the constitutional rights of citizens.
Republicans seem to be consumed by the struggle to disempower and delegitimize the left and to crush modernity and liberalism into dust. This is a struggle they've invented, based on fear and delusions, since the country was the product of progressive thinking in the first place and designed to stay that way to adapt to changing circumstances and preserve our freedoms.
Who's struggling here? The right's struggle is voluntary, optional and based on lies. For those they've attacked, though, like the failing middle class, the poor and disadvantaged and those without affordable health care, the struggle is real. Of course, as a part of their shtick, they pretend they're under attack. They're the victims. This is nothing but lies. They are the aggressors.
Republicans don't only favor business consolidation. They consolidate everything. Fewer people with more. They've taken away the dreams of average Americans to pile them into the teeming coffers of the rich. It's no wonder Americans are obsessed with celebrity culture. Celebrities and wealthy people are living their dreams for them. Average persons dream vicariously now. Jeff Bezos visits space and then distributes trinkets to the little people in celebration. Trinkets and the vestiges of their dreams are all they have left. In place of their dreams there are delusions, the false hopes of the dispossessed.
I'm suffering from a failure of imagination. I can't imagine the void. I can't imagine a void like Trump. He wins what might be the biggest contest ever, without a lot of political debt, and all he has to do is hire some good people and behave himself and he will be loved.
Doesn't he want to be loved? There's no love in Trump's world. Only ambition and advantage. Trying to fill the void. It can't be filled. It's a waste of resources. The need is too great. And since Trump hates himself there's nothing to build on. There's no love in Trumpworld.
J. D. Vance is off to a rocky start in his Senate run. Cut the boy a break. He hasn't yet learned to lie with the ease and alacrity of an average Republican.
I have a compromise in mind. Trump can tweet again if he goes to jail like a good boy.
Bork came up, yet again, during that Kavanaugh confirmation. Republicans want us to believe Democrats started the partisan nastiness with SCOTUS nominations. Of course they didn't.
For one thing, Republicans are nasty. Democrats are nice. For another thing, Democrats were baited. They dared us. They nominated a partisan lunatic instead of a legitimate legal scholar, putting us on the spot.
What were the Dem's to do? Just goes to show how screwed you are when good faith departs from governance. Bork extolled the benefits of monopolies. He thought they were great.
Thank Republicans for the annihilation of so many small businesses. They didn't have the lobbyists to pay to play. Thank them when you pay a bundle for shit internet with nowhere else to turn.
Republicans want all the power and no responsibility.
Who says good wins out over evil? The survivors, who like to flatter themselves. Reassure themselves. Justify their efforts and their losses.
WWII is the defining case. And it never should have happened. The problem is, the dead weren't around to say how they felt about it.
Let's call it the RSDA. Elise Stefanik has toed the line as required. According to her Republicans are going to save us all from the Radical Socialist Democrat (sic) Agenda. God speed, my little hellhound!
How low can you go? We thought we'd seen the worst with Bush.
He inherited everything humming. He left smoking ruins. Economy a shambles. Unending, pointless wars. And, his second-term dream of "fixing" social security was a bust.
He would've trashed that if he could. And then there came Trump, a walking shitpile of majestic dimensions. Where's the bottom? We have yet to find out.
Any modern American of insubstantial means should be able to list Trump as a comorbidity. He's a threat to life and health.
Let go of the dream. Let go so we can save what's left of it. Mourn the loss but let it go. We had Camelot and it's gone. Get over it or things will get uglier than we can imagine.
Why is it these government-despising Republicans can't stay away from it? From its origins these kinds of "conservative" parties are comprised of people who want a leg-up or want to lock-in one they already have. Fine. But they get exclusive about it.
They want to exclude us. There's that jealousy. And they want more of a leg-up than they're due. A charming and easy life. See how this ties in with racism? They want your life to be locked into a course of difficulty. Arbitrarily. Theirs to be a free ride.
They want a life as free from care as a child's. The government is that surrogate momma, the grantor and guarantor of privilege. It all comes down to privilege. They want something for nothing. And they want it forever, down through the generations.
Among those who honor under-the-bus-throwing Ted Cruz has earned an encomium. His wife and girls are all wearing tire tracks . . .
Trump's "big lie" about the election has competition. I favor the more subtle ones for recognition. In particular, the disconnect between the drive to control everything and the ruse or delusion that they can, without responsibility. That lie plays out in accusations, like those about "antifa" and the ridiculous assertion that anything on the left compares to the crime cartel on the right.
Republicans have controlled everything for forty years. Democrats are utterly defeated. Sometimes I think it would be better if Democrats left the field. Gave up entirely. Threw in the towel. Then the country could see what Republicans have in mind for us -- a monstrous "libertarian" dystopia. Then Republicans couldn't blame anyone else. They would anyway, I know. Worth trying, anyway.
I don't begrudge anybody their existence. However, citizenship isn't a right without conditions. That right might not be revocable but some of the rights it confers are, such as the freedom to participate in a way that fundamentally threatens the system that protects those rights. Or, to directly deny the rights of others of similar legal standing.
Our fellow citizens. Change that. Even non-citizens, when it comes to human rights.
What do we do with the My Pillow dude? He has a right to his opinions and their expression. He doesn't have the right to see those amplified in public. Nobody does. He's so crazy it wouldn't stop him if we ended anonymity on social media though that might not be a bad idea. Regulation. A society has a right to regulate the dissemination of lies.
I'm not saying that decision is easy to implement. But somebody has to do it.
