Honoring Her Offer
The Lobbyist and I were far away from Washington when the Tea Baggers invaded and I think that was a very wise move -- protective of my mental health and perhaps even my liberty. Hard to imagine a more despicable bunch of people: 87,000 white whiners who don't know much about anything, except they sure know they're victims -- and that everybody except the most racist of twits is responsible for whatever highly abstract victimhood has been visited upon them during their long cossetted lives in the American white middle-class.
One of my co-workers, a very nice, mild-mannered lady, yesterday commented upon all this to the effect that 'both sides should tone down their rhetoric.' I respectfully disagreed. I was tempted to say something like, 'Yes, if only both the Jews and the fucking Brownshirts had been more moderate back then, how much unpleasantness might have been avoided.' But I didn't, and I attribute this diplomatic fact to my pleasant escape over the weekend.
Not to dwell on the Beckerwoods too long, but their whole project "Restoring Honor" to America is something they can only believe in because they're incapable of undertsanding it. (Is this a
sine qua non of most faith?) Honor is predicated in truth. To be honorable, you must first and foremost tell the truth; also you need to act so as to make your promises accurate predictions of your behavior; and you need to act in a manner that will not require you to lie later. All of these needs further require that, as much as possible, you determine and are mindful of what is true. But the Tea Baggers, like Republicans in general, have absolutely no interest in the truth, except as a trivial prop for their phony poses of knowing. Witness
Michelle Bachmann who inflates the rally size by a factor of twenty. Like all members of her "Capitalist" cult, she speaks Advertese. There is no term for honor or truth in Advertese, just as there is no word for weather in Hawaiian.
Glen Beck is as fit to restore honor as Tiger Woods is to restore chastity.
Peckerwood Über Alles.
I'm sure it's best for my mental health that I'm getting out of town this weekend, what with Glen Peckerwood and his brownshirts taking over the Mall. Never mind the marchers, those who don't understand that all these people are scum are to be shunned, excluded from all civil intercourse until they show clear, consistent signs of raised consciousness. Alas, that kind of radical conversion will be quite beyond the usual Tea Partier, and even beyond the typical negligent who doesn't recognize them for the fascists they are. Most of these people will go to their graves, live the rest of their cosseted, ignorant lives firmly ensconced in their "designer victimhood," convinced that despite riches and security vastly beyond their deserving, they have been oppressed by the reverse-racist, left-wing government.
Here's the quintessential example, one
Bruce Majors, royalist stooge who fancies himself a revolutionary, the guy who wrote the
Tea Bagger's Guide to Avoiding Brown People and Foreigners in DC. Racist, woman-hating asshole, he's basically the movement mascot.
They're "restoring honor" to the Lincoln Memorial, on the anniversary of The Speech. Kind of like restoring cleanliness with fecal graffiti.
We're so fucked.
The Opposite of News
So I read today in WaPo's Excrescence that 18% of American think Obama is a Muslim, and not just a putz. I would bet that this 18% is entirely within that portion of the population that has zero idea what a Muslim is. Moreover, at least 18% of Americans think professional wrestling is real, that aliens abduct people in order to play doctor with them in their flying saucers, and that Jonah was sawllowed by the whale. So fucking what? A lot of Americans are really, really, really stupid. This is the result of 60 years of television, accelerated by 15 years of Fox. But it's the opposite of news -- which is why column inches are being devoted to it. If real news gets carried real changes will have to be made.
Is it wrong to pray for the big asteroid, or just stupid?
Last Act Dilemmas
It's my birthday today and I feel considerably older, having been mugged by the oral surgeon Saturday last, and being now on a cocktail of antibiotics and painkillers that prevents the coccasion's proper debauchery.
I confess I'm running out of capacity to even look upon the atrocity of American politics. The Foxagandists want to take us back to the Dark Ages, when superstition and subjugation ruled for the most ruthless and brutal few. And there doesn't really seem to be much hope of stopping them, short of a large asteroid, at least not until the next fascist scheme collapses under the weight of its own parasitism and paranoia. Certainly the milquetoasts of the Geithner administration aren't going to help matters.
Evil takes dominion over even the best, it seems. In the same way that the only rational course for the even the sanest Iranian leader is to acquire a nuclear weapon before the next Republican occupies the White House, the sanest course for even the best American may be to grab for as much loot as he can put away before now and when the democracy finally dissolves, and hope that is enough of a hedge in the coming kleptocracy to see one through to The End. In view of this, I sometimes feel the urgent need to pen a dark, brooding "action film," one that primes the audience, by close-up revelation of the villain's hideously despicable and perverted indulgences, for the big deafening, climactic explogasm when said villain gets his comeuppance in the last reel. The trouble is I'd want the baddies to be Republicans, and the sort of people who enjoy that sort of movie are at heart Republicans. Still, as such they are so self-blind they might not recognize themselves in the as the Hero dispatches them with a manly sneer.
Real America
I rendezvoused with my siblings in my mother's home town, a rustbelt burg on the Great Lakes. It's a place of great natural beauty, at least when it's not iced in, but it's in the crapper economically. The old Carnegie Library is for sale, likewise the Free Methodist church downtown, and the newsstand where I bought Hunter Thompson's Hell's Angels and several Kerouac books, along with other influential texts. One can buy a four-bedroom hosue there for under fifty thousand dollars. I saw a beautiful 150- year-old place on 25 acres with 1100 feet of creek frontage, asking $175, 000!
There must be hundreds, perhaps thousands of these towns. Union busting, NAFTA, free market capitalism in action. My fellow Americans, welcome to the Third World.
