Roast in hell, assholes.
It may suggest that there are some hitherto unmeasured benefits to having the Republicans out of power: the old brownshirts seem to be kicking off at an most excellent rate -- latest to go Irving
Meritocracy Kristol and William
the Smug Safire. I t's definitely more stressful and depressing and a whole lot less fun when your team is losing. That's why so many Repuritan's have been leaving Congress lately. And maybe that's why these old assholes are cashing in now; the purpose has gone out of their team-driven lives.
What a fine little Yom Kippur gift. So many graves, so little piss.
The Beautiful People
I happened to be down on the Mall, in the secret underground headquarters of the Ministry when the March of the Whinos was taking place. I surfaced for awhile to do a little field anthropology and, holy shit, did
that ever prove the maxim: There are
things you can't unsee. There were many thousands of them. Not quite as many as at the Anti-War Rally a few years back but still, a dismayingly large number of very pasty, very smug people. My highly unscientific sampling suggests the crowd was 99.5 % Ofay. The median age was probably about 52. They were an average of 27 pounds over their ideal weight. Half smoked. Forty-two percent had misspellings on the signs they carried.
None that I observed wore a collared shirt, a tie or, heaven forfend, a sport jacket on their pilgrimage to the Capitol of the country they so love. It was truly Glenbeckistan on the march.
Amost everybody brought a digital camera and I have never seen so many video cameras in my life. They weren't so much having a protest as posing as protestors for the shoot. Sure there were things they were against; they're Republicans and that's what Republicans do - They are above all Againsters. And now that there's a black Democrat in the White House they can be Insurgents against everything, all the time. They don't have to contribute, they can just Do Good by sabotaging, by standing athwart the Evil Negro Agenda and yelling stop! In unison. Through bullhorns.
But they were mostly against "Obama-care". Even as these fat, lazy, self-indulgent, slobs suck up ungodly amounts of Lipitor, diabetes treatment, heart surgeries, gall bladder treatment, GI amelioration, cancer treatment et cetera et cetera, often at government (Medicaid etc) expense, and always at someone else's expense, they march against the idea that anybody else should have their treatment paid for. Looking at them you could truly see, it really rankled them, the idea that their tax dollars might go to freeloaders. Of course defense contractor have been freeloading to the tune of $trillions for about 60 years now, and none of these people are bothered by that one little bit. Perhaps it's because defense contractors are mostly white.
Xenophobia R' Us
Among the other things I considered on my recent brief escape from America, is this: most of the millions of people who are so certain that "socialized medicine" would be the work of Satan, are surely the very ones who have never been to any of those hellish places where they have it: France, Italy, England, Switzerland, Korea, Japan et cetera. They're among the
70 some percent of Americans who don't even
have (let alone use) a passport.
Now, having been at least briefly in all of these places (and even received excellent free treatment in the hellish embrace of the England's "public 'elf") I cannot really say that I ever perceived these countries to be purgatorial places where the populace was notably tormented, or unhealthy.
Now, I love rambling around in America. I've seen a helluva a lot of it, including some of its most remote nooks and crannies. I've been to every state except (oddly) Wisconsin -- and I mean to get there one day soon. But it occurs to me that a lot of Americans are horribly narrowed by the fact that they never see anything but America -- and too often only the portions of America they can drive to, take their RV's to, launch their boats in et cetera. I think as people we're too often anchored by the things we wrongly believe are necessary to our comfort and enjoyment. We forget that in the presence of beauty and mystery we need very little. And we no longer valorize traveling light, throwing the accumulated junk over the side and striking out for parts unknown to us.
This state of affairs really is diametrically opposed to what made America, what made the Enlightenment for that matter. Nowadays it's fashionable in America to hate the people who have enough gumption to get up and go, to see if what's over the horizon is, as the fables have it, more wonderful than the Old Country. Why that lot is just a bunch of parasites, trying to horn in on the picket-fence, cable equipped Paradise of the DittoHeads.
Land of the Freaks
The Lobbyist and I had a nice long sojourn in Olde Europe, ogling Renaissance oil paintings of buxom nudes, sucking up truffles and caviar, swilling down flagons of Premier Cru and cracking many jokes with the locals about how ignorant and bigoted our countrymen are! Best of all, we got expense it to the Ministry of Elegance which passed on the bill to the hard-working, God-fearing little people who pay American income taxes! Of course, try as we did, we still only only managed to squander the equivalent of .002 second's-worth of the Iraq War, but when your needs are as simple as ours it's hard to run up a real Pentagon style tab.
Now that I'm back and over my jet-lag/hangover, it seems to me that many, many Americans are even more banal, stupid and wicked than I recall. These would be the ones for whom George W. had a sort of super-papal infallibility (despite his lifelong record of cowardice and bungling) but for whom Obama is evil incarnate. They are ready to believe absolutely anything negative about Obama, no matter how batshit crazy. Anf the media are ready to treat them with
deep respect, no matter how batshit crazy. America the beautiful.
