Excerpt: “Two House Republicans joined more than 160 Democrats on Friday in calling on President Trump to release his taxes.
Reps. Mark Sanford, R-S.C., and Walter Jones, R-N.C., signed a letter to Ways and Means Chairman Kevin Brady, R-Texas, and Senate Finance Chairman Orrin Hatch, R-Utah, calling on them to ask Treasury Secretary Steven Mnuchin to compel Trump to release his taxes for the past decade to those committees for review.
The letter is the latest move by Rep. Bill Pascrell, D-N.J., in trying to finally pry Trump’s taxes loose.
“Disclosure would serve the public interest of clarifying President Trump’s conflicts of interest in office, the potential for him to personally benefit from tax reform, and ensure that he is not receiving any preferential treatment from the IRS,” the letter leads.
“The Founding Fathers were so determined to prevent corruption among public officeholders that they wrote into our Constitution the foreign emoluments clause,” it continues. “Yet President Trump has chosen to keep an ownership stake in his businesses, in which we know that state-owned enterprises in China and the United Arab Emirates are involved. We know that his business ties stretch to India, Turkey, the Philippines and beyond. None of these potential conflicts and violations of the emoluments clause can be verified until and unless we have disclosure from President Trump.”
This all seemed pretty clear to me, back in January. Two GOP Representatives, now breaking ranks with their party, to address an obvious potential fraud—is proof to me (finally) that one does not have to take an ‘asshole’s oath’ to be accepted as a Republican. That there are only two—and here it is already April—puts a pretty hypocritical face on the rest of the party. We aren’t talking politics here—we’re talking complicity and collusion in a criminal conspiracy.
That the papers and the TV (and the people) talk about it endlessly, while our government pretends to oblivion to this ongoing conspiracy, is a crystal clear ‘FU’ to the American people. The rules only apply when you’re not in power, I guess—all evidence from the beltway certainly points that way. Hey—we may have been stupid enough to elect this guy—but there’s a limit, ya know? Are we supposed to put up with this Trumpster-fire for a whole year, two years? I don’t think so.
Fooling us into allowing you into the White House was easy. But now that you’re there, you have to obey the law to stay there—and Congress is supposed to impeach you when you flout the law, whether they want to or not. Odds are, Trump, you’re breaking several laws, right this minute—how long do you think the GOP is going to stonewall for you? I get that you love walls, but perhaps you don’t realize that you campaigned to put yourself in the brightest spotlight there is—and the truth is coming for you. The real question is whether the entire Republican party will be justifiably dragged down with you.
I guess it’s time we went full matriarchal up in this bitch—recent indications provide mounting evidence that women are better able to deal with modern life. In a global, hi-tech environment, cooperation works better than competition—giving the feminine mindset the advantage over the male. In the old world, a bellicose nature helped to grab up land and resources—now that all the land and resources have been grabbed (‘post-frontier’, if you will) civilization benefits more from teamwork than from pioneering.
While our premiere female politician, Elizabeth Warren, rails against income inequality and corruption, our premiere male politician, Trump, neglects his leadership role and uses his high office to stuff his own pockets. Women are more inclined to nurture the group—where men are inclined to compete for the alpha position. And fighting to be king of the hill, in a hill of seven billion, is more disruptive than empowering.
Seven billion means cooperate or die—and men just don’t get that—even now, they’re busily destroying the environment for a quick buck—deadbeat dads to the world. ‘Have your fun and don’t look back’ is bad enough when a child is involved—when it’s the atmosphere, or potable water, that’s species suicide. Women, for whatever reason, seem less inclined to ignore their children’s future—or their present welfare, for that matter—or their education… Would it be sexist of me to suggest that women are more concerned with children than men are?
As capitalism leads us all over a cliff, I’m thinking women are more likely to be able to let go of its siren song—to see past the status quo to the requirements of sheer survival. If that is true, it is only because women are the ultimate minority—they have always gotten the short end of the capitalist stick, so they are well aware of its shortcomings. Their lack of fealty to America’s traditional upper-hand, capitalism, is the one spark of hope in an ever-more-hacked democracy.
Not that there aren’t bad women—or good men—that’s not what I’m saying—I’m talking about our approach—the things we choose as goals as part of our nature, as much as our judgement. Do we look for advantage or compromise? Do we look for primacy or partnership—command or community? Fragile egos tend to go for all the former—and who has the most fragile egos, men or women?
A good person, we are told, avoids fighting unless it’s absolutely necessary—but the one who throws the first punch has the best chance of winning a fight. A good person, we are told, cares about others—but then again, one is supposed to look out for number one. Honesty is the best policy—but a little white lie can sometimes be the difference between life and death.
If these sound familiar, it may be because they are often the crux of a drama: to fight or not to fight, to give or to take, to be honest or not. So, one might assume that ethics adds drama to life—ethics tell us to find a way around our animal impulses—and that’s where the drama comes in. But, if we are successful, we feel that we’ve risen above our animal nature—ethics is our way of proving to ourselves that we are above dogs.
No offense to dogs—some of them are far nicer than people—but if you try to reason with a dog, you won’t get far. Then again, trying to reason with some people is no different. They use the pretense of reason to rationalize the behavior of an animal. Even math can be warped into the service of bullshit—4 out of 5 dentists agree.
Some claim that ethics are pretentious luxuries, a thin veneer that falls away at the first sign of deprivation or hunger. But the same could be said of friendship—and while that may be true of many friendships, or ethics, it is not true of all of them. Some people are kamikazes about their friendships, or their ethics—are these people mad? Or are the rest of us missing out on some key factor?
I think it depends on how much you value yourself—if you consider yourself a part of something, you’re less likely to see yourself as irreplaceable—you’re more likely to see sacrifice, on your part, as benefitting the whole. If you think of yourself as a ‘lone-wolf’ individual, you’re more likely to see your own survival as the bottom line.
So, it seems our choices are: 1. suicidally sacrificial or 2. selfishly self-centered—at this point, we realize that everything has two sides and there is no simple, rote answer to any question. A-little-of-each presents itself as the obvious answer—but is it really that simple? Sorry—no, nothing is simple—then again, it can be, if you shut your mind to the endless variety of existence. This accounts for the effectiveness of some douchebag giving out with a derisive ‘whatever’ as a rebuttal to common sense. Apparently, ‘I don’t give a shit’ is an acceptable substitute for ‘I know what I’m doing’.
I don’t respect people that walk away from a losing argument—to me, losing an argument is the most educational experience there is—to find out that there is a better answer, a better way of seeing things. What could be of greater value? When I argue, it’s not to win the fight, it’s to communicate a different point of view—and if I lose the argument, I’m obligated to recognize that the other person had a better grasp of the issue than I did—and that I’ve learned something.
Even if someone hears me out and insists on disagreeing with me, because of their ‘faith’ or some such non-rational bullshit—even that I can respect more than someone who enters into an argument just to be belligerent—and walks away with a ‘whatever’ when they can’t bully me with their rhetoric. That’s just being a jerk, in my book.
The glut of such jerks online is similar to the increased hate and xenophobia that we see today—and it has the same source. Trump is a bully-arguer, and a racist fear-monger—and he won the election (or, at least, the Electoral College)—so, other bully-arguers, and racist fear-mongers, feel emboldened, having such a prominent role-model. And in the end, the bad example of our head of state may do more lasting damage than his bad governance. Bad laws can be rescinded, but encouraging people to hate is a poor lesson that can have a life-long impact on our society.
That is my strongest reason for wanting Trump impeached—conduct unbecoming an American. A leader should be an example—and his incompetent, unethical leadership isn’t nearly as damaging as his bad example. Trump isn’t just a bad president—he’s a bad person. #Sad!
Improv – Late in the Day
Thursday, April 20, 2017 3:29 PM
The Job of Jazz (2017Apr19)
The R&B brass section, the vocal back-up trio, the echo effect—and then the electric guitar comes in. It’s got smooth power—and makes you feel like you’re madly in love. But the drums seal the deal—you fall into another world—a world that was hiding behind the silence. At that point, anything the front man sings will sound like sexy poetry—he could be reading from a phone book. And that’s the artifice in art—to the audience it is transporting—to the creator it is hard work, made to seem effortless.
Poetry is much the same—Eliot called it ‘a mug’s game’. Writing in general is a matter of pacing and rhythm—even the graphic arts have a sweep to them that is the visual equivalent of rhythm and pacing—composition and contrast, highlights and empty space.
The paradox is pure—self-expression is not for the creative worker—it is for everyone else. It is an expression—which presumes a listener, a viewer, a reader. Yes, it is your unique and personal self-expression—but it is still an expression—a message sent—and why send a message if not to connect to a recipient?
That is the nakedness of it—to be honestly self-expressive is to reveal who we are—and who we are is the sum of our lifetimes. Thus honest self-expression becomes one’s life story—who we are and how we live. Its revelatory nature is the thing that frightens many people away—and they are all quite sensible people. Apparently, strong feelings and conflict drive some people to creative self-expression—contented people can enjoy art (I’m in that group) but they aren’t as driven as those who live and breathe their art as an almost exclusive preoccupation.
Some people insist on being the audience. They’ll call out to a celebrity actor by their TV character’s name—ignoring both reality and the hard work of the actor in an unconscious effort to merge entertainment with reality. To the actor, I imagine, that’s a double-edged compliment—the high regard of the delusional—but with their numbers so high, ratings are guaranteed—in some way, he or she is making their living by feeding that delusion.
And am I any saner, just because I know to turn off my willing suspension of disbelief as the credits roll? We all crave seeing our lives as something other than the reality—we love to connect to feelings we share, to experience vicariously and empathize with the challenges and exertions of heroes and heroines. Reading a good book isn’t much different from living in another time and place as another person. Coming to the end of a great movie is like waking from an incredible dream. Sex, drugs, and liquor have their place—but there is no escapism like the arts.
Hadyn – Sonata in C (Excerpt)
Friday, April 21, 2017 12:42 AM
These new videos I’ve posted today include one that is a sight-reading of the 2nd and 3rd movements from a Haydn Sonata in C (I forget the number). First of all, I misspelled Haydn’s name in the video, which is always embarrassing, yet I always do it. Secondly, I don’t keep any kind of rhythm and everyone knows that you have to keep a steady rhythm. Try to think of it as conversational sight-reading. Talented musicians sometimes take exception to my posts—they are the antithesis of good technique—and I get tired, sometimes, of explaining that I can’t play the piano as well as I would wish—but I like to do it, and I like to share it with people who aren’t so picky. I had a run-in just the other day and I wrote it up, but then I decided not to share it with you. Now, however, as a preemptive disclaimer to my poorly-played Haydn, I share it herewith:
Friday, April 14, 2017 6:28 PM
YouTube Scuffle (2017Apr14)
“Every Time We Say Goodbye” by Cole Porter (2013Jun06)
This is a video I posted four years ago. Three years go by—nobody watches, nobody cares—then, a year ago:
plica06 (1 year ago) This is so bad. You could have at least practised a bit before uploading.
xperdunn (1 year ago) plica06: What a perfect opportunity for you to show us all how it’s done with your own video performance. Or are you all talk and no go?
US GameRat (4 months ago) xperdunn: good thing you know how to handel this and im not being sarcastic at all, im being serious. dont worry about what he or she said, because even if you did or didnt practice that is one beautiful song and you deserve the love because i know what music is. i know why this was so good and it still is, so thank you for making this video become true because without this video i woulndt have any other help, and this is the only video i found because i have the same music, and i found it online and so youre basically helping me learn this song. but this video was better that what i thought than what i would find. you impressed me thank you! i dont care if this plica06 guy calls me some random 13 year-old-piano-player-wanna be, i dont give a shit. i love music, and no one can make me stop. i really have an extreme, basically addiction, or really really deep love over music. but yea. thanl you. at least you made this come true than someone judjing you by who you are because i know truly youre an amazing person. really. and im talking to xperdunn 🙂
xperdunn (4 months ago) US GameRat: thanks for the support, guy! We music-lovers must fight the forces of musical snobbery, encouraging everyone to enjoy music, no matter the trolls. Be well.
US GameRat (4 months ago) xperdunn yeah! thank you 🙂
pianoplaylist (2 hours ago) plica06 was extremely lacking in tact. I disagree though that he or she is a mere troll or a just a musical snob. You, sir, should fight the forces of mediocrity and make a version that is worthy of your years of investment of time and worthy of the genius work of art that this song is. It’s a free country and you can upload whatever half-baked, sight reading practice session you desire, but you obviously have the talent and the knowledge to refine your rendition and make it more pleasing to the ear. That would be more encouraging to the learners. Sorry for being harsh. I wish you the best in all things.
xperdunn:
So, you can see that plica06 is critical of my poor piano playing—and because I post my videos to encourage other non-talented music-lovers to go ahead and share what they love, I don’t take crap from nobody—that’s part of it, showing people that a troll is nothing but a guy wasting his time at the keyboard.
But pianoplaylist is critical because he thinks I can do better. That’s the trouble with the internet—everyone has an agenda and nobody knows the whole story. I can barely hold a cup of coffee in my left hand—intentional tremors are just one of the symptoms of nerve damage—poor short-term memory is another. My decades-long struggle with HepC and liver cancer and a liver transplant—and all the permanent damage that was done to my body and my mind—make my poor attempts something of a triumph, even though they suck by the usual standards.
And that is the reason I post my videos—anyone else out there who has been told that they weren’t meant to play music—ignore the critics. Anyone out there that is embarrassed to post their music—post it anyway—be brave. If you have even a pinch of ability, you will soon be much better than I am, or will ever be. As long as you love music—play it—share it—don’t stop to listen to anyone else—they should be playing their own music, not stopping your bliss.
I was extremely gratified that my sight-reading was able to help US GameRat to learn to play this beautiful tune by Cole Porter, an American legend. If he is the only person that takes heart from my posts, so be it—good enough. But who knows, maybe there are more young beginners out there….
There are seven billion people on the planet—and that’s a large number of people. If every one of them used the same amount of resources and energy as the average American, the Earth would ignite like a matchhead, leaving a gray, smoking waste where once we had green, lush bounty. I don’t say this to bedevil my countrymen—I’m just stating a fact.
Neither do I believe we are guilty as people for living as we do. The evil logic of Capitalism creates the over-abundance of pollution and waste, as much as our lifestyles do. In many cases, as in the use of a personal, gas-powered vehicle, the choice of whether to use one is made a matter of ‘can one afford to?’ rather than ‘should one use a car, at all?’ And it isn’t the citizenry that decides how much public transportation is available—it is wealthy capitalists who determine what industries are most profitable—and the health and safety of people does not enter into that formula.
On the one hand we have politics and government, which we all debate with enthusiasm. On the other hand we have the obvious—that each of us wants to live his or her own life without restraint. Simply put, we don’t want the government interfering in our lives—just in everyone else’s.
Government governs best which governs least—except for my next-door neighbor, who needs a lot of governing, right? But government can’t manage the welfare of the citizenry without some control over the citizenry. We try to make that okay by providing the citizens with control of their government, through democracy, but in the end that government must impose rules upon us, whether those rules were democratically arrived at or not.
So, ideally, we want rules that will constrain everyone’s behavior, but which we ourselves find little or no burden. For many people, the criminalization of pot carries no onus, because they don’t smoke pot. For those who do, the criminality of it is an outrage. For those earning minimum wage, income taxes are no great burden—a little bit less than too little is no big deal. For those who must pay millions, taxes seem truly hurtful.
Politics, as we have lately seen, is a far cry from government. Politics used to be an arena for those who felt they knew, better than the main run of folks, how to govern—but politics has devolved into a kind of industry, where motives (if there are any, beyond money or power) are no longer ideals. There are exceptional politicians, still—but their tiny numbers make them less than the main thrust of political discourse—and they are often ridiculed by the ‘stuffed-shirts brigade’ for trying to do something unusual—as if the ‘usual’ had some sanctity to it.
Plus, politicians have surrendered themselves to the moneyed interests as the natural course of things—where, in the past, their reluctance to bow to pressure was their only difference from the businesspeople they now submit to, as if business had the rights instead of people. If they must be so craven, they should just scrap the whole wasteful circus and let the businesspeople run things for themselves. That’s not a bad idea—let business deal with the problems of humanity for a while and maybe they’ll realize that neglecting people is, in the long run, as bad for business as it is for the people.
But let’s be real—people are so stupid they’d burn this country to the ground, if only they can keep making a fast buck. The few sensible people among the crowd talk too softly to be heard over the shouting of the self-important. We haven’t lived like the other animals for a long, long time—yet we still think and act like them. We have the ability to coordinate the entire human race into one, united family—but that is the last thing anyone in power wants to do. They tell us to focus on the ‘economy’, meaning the shell-game that they are currently winning, rather than any bigger picture that involves a higher form of civilization.
I see us all too clearly—and I’ll tell you true: if we destroy ourselves, it will be no great loss. If we can’t do any better than we are right now, the entire Earth and everything that lives on it (or what’s left of it) will be better off without humanity’s thoughtless abuse. And why are we all working so hard—seven billion sweating and striving so that seven hundred or so can enjoy the fabulous wealth and power that humanity is capable of?
All you hard workers out there—start taking long lunches—let the assholes figure out where the toner is for once. And stop watching the news until they rediscover journalism—or at least until they start ignoring Trump. Trump may be president, but still, we are all stupider every time he speaks. And that is only slightly less true for every Republican politician and spokesperson. Let’s face it—they are not another side of things—they are the wrong side of things—else why would they have to hack the system with Wikileaks and Citizen’s United, etc.? They do not express a different side of the truth—they seek to obscure the truth—and that’s not acceptable. Not to me. Only to a media that thrives on confusion and sensation and distraction.
I don’t want to bring down clownish assholes like Trump and the rest of the GOP—I want to incite a rising up of the people who’ve given too much and gotten too little in return. I want people to stand up on their hindlegs and start barking back at these slimy crooks—bring enough light into our society that the flimsy facades of these bastards become as transparent as onion skin. Then we won’t have to topple Trump and his ilk—they’ll crawl back into the holes they came from, their putrid skin burnt by the sunlight of reason, justice, and tolerance.
Monday, April 17, 2017 3:20 PM
Jerks Of a Feather (2017Apr17)
Like calls to like—Trump is more interested in Kim Jong Un than in anyone in our country. That’s because both leaders are far more concerned with their egos than with the welfare of their citizens. Un inherited poor citizens and Trump grabbed up the rich citizens—and even the world’s largest ocean won’t keep them from standing toe-to-toe, puffing out their chests though the rest of the world holds its breath against the possibility of nuclear winter.
Trump’s got it easier—all he has to distract us from is his treasonous campaign, his ignorance, his incompetence, his taxes, and his nepotism. Un has to actually distract his people from their starvation in a country with no electricity or telephones—a much heavier lift. But give Trump his full four years and who knows? The two countries may end up looking much the same.
Retail stores are hurting from the rise of Amazon, etc., and the cheapness and convenience of the Post Office, UPS, and FedEx. The USPS may not be carrying any first-class letters anymore, with the internet and email rendering them obsolete, but the package biz is booming—our local postal worker complains about the packages that clog up his office when we don’t pick up our mail every day. And with their price-point (and certain grandfathered-in legal restrictions) the post office maintains a strong advantage over third-party delivery services, like UPS.
The fact that many entry-level jobs at retail stores are disappearing, as site-specific shopping disappears, would be no great loss, as careers—but many of those jobs were taken by young people—who were already hard-pressed to find employment, or work experience of any kind. Technology always subtracts jobs from the economy—tech-positive types will assure us that they create new jobs while they destroy the old ones, but let’s take this retail business as a case study.
Floorwalkers and clerks were once needed for every shop in the mall—will there be an equal demand for UPS and FedEx drivers? And will that experience prepare young employees for future jobs as well as working in a retail store? I don’t think so. I think it’s time Silicon Valley started designing apps that use people instead of code—create jobs, not programs. Otherwise we’re headed for a fully-automated society with zero employment.
That would be doable, in a somewhat socialist society—but in pure capitalism, unemployment means poverty, period. So we can either start progressing backwards—or embrace socialism. Yes, it’s ironic that capitalism created the situation, our present race towards human joblessness—and for profit, no less. But that doesn’t change the facts: that a capitalist society requires consumers, and consumers can’t pay without jobs. It’s also ironic that business owners are even more vulnerable than workers, in that any business, nowadays, can disappear overnight—and losing a business is a much greater fall than merely losing a job.
Sunday, April 16, 2017 3:00 PM
Happy Easter (2017Apr16)
Pick your preference—the solemnity of a holy day, or an Easter egg hunt and a fight over the Cadbury egg. I prefer combining the two and watching Turner Classics’ day-long re-airing of the Hollywood treatments of the Christ—kinda like Eddy Haskell reading the New Testament to June Cleaver.
As a boy, in Catholic Church every Sunday, I would look at the bas-reliefs on the walls of the church—the Stations of the Cross were depicted in small, white-marble tableaux and spaced along the walls on both sides. I was fascinated by the way everyone had a different way of sticking their tongue out to receive the sacrament—it was cognitive dissonance to walk up to the priest and stick out your tongue, but you had to do it.
I never liked Easter egg hunts—they were competitive, but you weren’t supposed to be greedy—very strange, conflicting messages. You were supposed to find as many as you could, but you shouldn’t find them all, because then the littler kids would be left out. Stupid game. We did it for our kids, but we put their eggs on opposite sides of the yard so they each had a search area and could take their time.
I don’t like Easter—it’s like Christmas without the fun and presents. And way too many hard-boiled eggs were involved—which meant deviled eggs, egg salad sandwiches and just plain hard-boiled eggs, with salt, for a snack—for days afterward—yuck. And I hate mint jelly, which only appeared at Easter dinner.
I think Americans like Jesus because he dissociated faith from the state, just like our founders dissociated the state from the monarchy. And it’s a grand story—death and resurrection, freedom from the pains of this world—I’d buy it—who wouldn’t. But faith is like quitting smoking—it sounds a lot better than it is—especially when you’re down in the dumps.
Do we have laws or don’t we? The Trump campaign colluded with Putin and Wikileaks during the election—and that’s treason. Trump refuses to divest himself of his businesses—or release his tax returns—or close his D.C. hotel—all in direct violation of the Constitution’s banning of emoluments of any kind from foreigners to the president—and that’s an impeachable offense. Trump has hired unvetted, unqualified family and friends to important posts in his ‘administration’—which is nepotism. Do we have laws or don’t we?
Trump spent millions of taxpayer dollars to bomb Syria (once) and bomb Afghanistan (once)—and, as intended, we are all taking about those non-events now, instead of running him out of office, as the good lord intended. There are at least ten different reasons for impeachment proceedings—and the only reason they aren’t proceeding is that Trump is in their party.
You know partisanship has gotten out of hand when the Republicans turn a blind eye to blatantly criminal behavior in a president. And you know that media-hype has gotten out of hand when the president so obviously blows things up for no reason other than distraction—and the media run with it, anyway, as if his unfitness for office suddenly disappeared.
This whole thing is beyond sanity—don’t try to tell me that our politicians represent the people, when we the people stand aghast at the perfidy of the Republicans and nothing is done to rectify their total dismissal of any laws or ethics. These skeezy bastards deserve to go to prison—they all seem to have a hard-on for more prisons, so let’s send them there.
Of course, the real shame is us. Racism elected Trump—his ‘platform’ is nothing but the erasure of any accomplishment of Obama—and the enormous number of haters and pigs in this country voted for him because he promised to take away their healthcare (and everyone else’s—especially minorities). Our government sucks the big hairy throbbing red one—but we citizens aren’t much better—we brought Trump on ourselves, through our own ignorance—no wonder the pols are in no hurry to oust him.
Chris Farrell has tuned the piano and spring has officially arrived—the sour flatness of a far-too-long winter is broken into shards of light by the bright eagerness of our perfectly-attuned piano. If you don’t see much of Chris lately, it’s because the Danbury WestConn needs him to tune all their pianos, all hundred-something of them, all year ‘round. Also, he’s working up a new website and writing the occasional song for the UN—yeah, that UN. His daughter is also busy—involved in two recent films “The Fits” and “Salero” (I forget if she directed, produced or both) and you can see them on Netflix if you’re looking for the good stuff.
It’s easy to stay humble when my piano tuner plays my piano far better than I ever could—come to think of it, that was also true of old Steve Anderson, who used to tune our old keyboards—I’m just not very good. But I sure sound better on a tuned piano—they practically play themselves.
Improv – Rainy Spring
Well, the world is a troublesome place—and it seems we add to its power and convenience at our peril—in this present time, with anonymized global comms, shoddy fissile-material security, jet bombers, and alt-news websites recruiting for terror, bad actors have never had it so good.
Every great thing our technology can do is diluted, polluted by the entrenched interests, especially in fuel-energy. Every great thing our Internet can do is smeared by the insecurity of hacking and phishing—the more we welcome it into our lives, the greater the risks. Every great thing our country meant to do for the world has been consumed by our military-industry complex abroad and the NRA at home. The eternal health crisis of modern drug use has been opaqued and diverted by our blind insistence on ‘criminalizing’ drugs—meanwhile Big Pharma bankrupts families (and promotes drug abuse) selling ‘legal’ drugs by prescription.
Improv – Thoughtful
None of the misbehavior is new—but the means, the opportunities, and the exploding variety of white-collar crimes, child armies, and gang activities all combines to demonstrate the kind of explosive change the good guys could be enjoying, if we weren’t being snookered into complacency by vested interests and politicians who see their very existence threatened by the possibilities of digital voting and online government transparency—these things will happen over the cold, dead bodies of the establishment’s entitled. And all the while politicians’ll puff up their chests and orate about democracy—and afterwards, a lobbyist will hand them a check for their reelection campaign.
The English had their mad King George—but unlike us, with Trump, they didn’t suffer the shame of having elected him. Trump is the triumph of ignorance and the death of representative government. And the Republicans who use his populist carnival-barking to advance their partisanship are truly “dogs who have caught a car”—up until now, we had the sense to expect them not to govern—but we foolishly made them our governing body, and they don’t know how—they’d lost for so long, they forgot that ‘winning’ wasn’t the actual job.
Thursday, April 13, 2017 2:04 PM
Dumber than Dirt (2017Apr13)
Trust in Trump—to perfectly simulate what a child would do, as president. He just dropped ‘the biggest non-nuke bomb in our arsenal’ on a suspected ISIS site in Afghanistan. Remember Afghanistan? That’s the country we armed in the eighties, so that they could repel the Soviet invaders—and when they did, we lost their phone-number—leaving the Afghanis with a ruin for a country and no post-war aid or support—like we have traditionally given, even to our enemies.
Twenty years later, in 2003, as we prepared to invade, we even joked that we couldn’t bomb Afghanistan ‘back to the stone age’ because they were already there—and there was truth to that. Fifteen years further along, Trump figures that one big bomb oughta do it—what do you think?
I think he’s dumber than the dirt he kicked up. The arms-makers must be drooling at this guy—it cost millions to send that single flight of Tomahawks to Syria—and I bet it wasn’t cheap to drop the world’s biggest bomb, either. At least he saved us the expense of getting congressional approval.
Poor Afghanistan—we love to fight there, but god forbid we help them keep their peace. That’s the trouble with all these trouble-spots—when the firing stops, everyone turns their backs. Why don’t we try fighting to help some of these people—is that too far beneath us? But then, Americans aren’t big on fixing stuff, even in their own country—I think we’re missing an opportunity here—infrastructure is universal—if we started fixing our own, we could globalize—there are plenty of places in the world that need rebuilding. Of course, they’d have to stop shooting first—and so would we.
Jerzy Kosinsky en rechts Harry Mulisch *28 februari 1969
Sunday, April 09, 2017 1:48 PM
Jerzy Kosinski, the enigmatic and controversial writer of the 1960s-1970s, is perhaps most famous for his screenplay “Being There” (1979). That successful Peter Sellers vehicle has become a classic tautology: given a stylized-enough established order, a complete idiot can stumble his way to the presidency. The Trump administration, to date, has been so fraught with purposeful malfeasance that we tend to overlook Trump’s Chauncey-Gardener-like qualities.
Now, with the advent of military strikes, his perfect ignorance comes to the fore. As usual, there are documented past statements (that is to say, as always with Trump, Tweets) where he criticized Obama for taking similar actions in Syria, and in the same way (absent Congressional approval) and calling it a mistake. And, as always, our military action is spurious, when what we really need is a definitive plan, a long-term road-map towards specific goals—and one that accounts for the existence of other countries—you know, something like Obama was doing—facing the reality that a ‘Big Stick’ is of limited use.
But the would-be-funny-if-it weren’t-so-scary part is the news media, seriously discussing what amounts to knee-jerk militaristic grandstanding—as if it did indeed have a definitive plan behind it. This is Chauncey Gardener to a tee. Serious panelists mistake vague mindlessness for inscrutable subtlety, chasing their tails to find the adult philosophy behind a child’s wanderings.
What lowers the present situation beneath even “Being There” is that these talking heads know that they are debating the impulses of an idiot—they simply discuss everything with a bias towards false gravitas—out of habit. They can’t help themselves—bullshit has become their lifestyle.
Thus we see that 59 cruise missiles don’t end a six-year-old civil war—fancy that. A military fellow pointed out that the strike didn’t even target radar or surface-to-air installations, which makes it safer to come back and do it again, and is SOP for a first strike. Even as a spurious first move, the Tomahawk flurry didn’t make sense—it was a display of impotence as much as anything else.
So by all means, talk about Trump’s increased Presidential-ness, now that he’s a big-boy Commander-in-Chief—keep that bullshit flowing, because god forbid anyone on cable news talks like a sane person with their head on straight. Just keep in mind that Trump didn’t do a goddamned thing for those poor, beautiful children he ‘cried’ over—or any of the Syrian refugees like them whom Trump is presently afraid to allow to live here.
Syrian security tries to quash dissent in Douma, but residents remain defiant, Jan. 14, 2012. (Elizabeth Arrott/VOA)
Thursday, April 06, 2017 2:24 PM
Devin Nunes, having erred on the side of Trump-partisanship to the point of public misconduct, has finally bowed to the inevitable result of such mischief and stepped down as head of the House Intel Committee investigating the Trump-Putin collusion. How many Trump-people does that make, so far? How many have been fired or resigned in disgrace? And how many good people have refused his appointments, refused to be complicit in his collapsing administration, or have been fired simply for being competent, long-term civil servants (the ‘enemy’)? There’s at least one Russian spy who’s been released from jail and whisked off to Moscow before he can be called in for questions.
Apparently, Trump’s hatred of visibility, and its accompanying disapproval, has led to a lot of empty government offices where, ordinarily, people would be pointing out unethical, counter-productive, or downright dangerous policy problems. The EPA has been put in solitary confinement, along with the NFS and many other agencies with a watchdog component. Trump likes rules, but only when he’s the one making them.
This helps distract us from him being the first president to ever be elected without any experience in government or the military—and helps him line his pockets with whatever international deals he makes. While all the people in DC, outside of his inner circle, have devoted their lives to public service, Trump’s career has been about greed—and old habits die hard.
Pro-government demonstartion in Latakia
But worse than his shady dealings, his hypocrisy about Syria is sickening. He speaks of seeing photos of ‘beautiful children’ who were gassed by Assad and his determination to do ‘something’ about it. The Syrian Civil War is six years old now—is it finally real because Trump saw a photograph? Who is this asshole? And the pretense that he’s starting from zero—what a narcissist. Hey, bub, the world has been trying to put this fire out for a long time—it’s not new—you are. And the same could be said for Trade, Healthcare, or Civil Rights. All these things are well-discussed issues—the only thing new is that you are pretending to care about them now—just like you pretended to care about the Constitution to win an election, without reading the damn thing.
I saw his ‘interview’ with the New York Times—I have an institutionalized schizophrenic friend whose phone conversations are more coherent—and more human. Okay, I’m sixty-one—I’ve seen a few miles of road—so, I am older and wiser now—but I still never thought we’d elect a president whom I’m sure I could do a better job than. Understand that I’m not claiming I would be a good president—I’m saying I, or anyone I know, would make a better president than Trump. How did one-sixth of eligible voters elect a pig that the rest of us despise? It’s like the NRA’s stranglehold on gun rights, writ large—a small but vocal group of delusional yahoos defeat common sense among the majority.
Anti-Assad protests in Baniyas, April 2011
In that interview, he urged the Times to follow that ‘Susan Rice’ story. Trump, do you mean the criminal allegations you spuriously made without proof or evidence of any kind? That story, you lying bag of shit?
Our democracy has been hacked—and the proof is that maniac in the Oval Office. I don’t care if it’s the Russians or the Super-Wealthy, but some sons-of-bitches have taken over our democracy—and majority rule is dead. I’m sick of it and I’d like to take a flamethrower to the bastards responsible.
When Trump spent years lying about President Obama’s birth, it was excusable—a private citizen can say whatever they want about the president—even a filthy lie. When Trump spent a year lying about Hillary Clinton in every possible way, it was excusable—he was in a hard-fought election and things get said on both sides. Even when he lied about the dozen or more women who came forward to accuse him of groping, etc.—even that was still within the heat of the campaign.
When he fired Susan Rice because she was honest about the unconstitutional nature of his travel ban, he was as much as saying, “The law is whatever I say it is.” The courts disagreed, thank goodness—but the mindset remains.
Trump is under investigation—has been since before he was elected, it turns out. He and his people are colluding with Russia—and the bad press has spurred him to try to make the investigation focus on how the information was collected—instead of what it found. It still found something—and the sooner the quicker, as far as either removing his administration or absolving them of collusion. Either way, whining about procedures can only divert and delay for so long.
But trying to smear Susan Rice—trying to throw her under his own bus—is cold, even for a POS like our President. There is no excuse for this kind of blind thrashing around, tweeting untruth upon untruth—even if Obama, or Rice, had done wrong (something only a pig like Trump could imagine) it wouldn’t change the fact of the Trump-Russian collusion.
I’d appreciate the media highlighting an important aspect of these tweets. The reason everyone finds them so shocking is that we know they couldn’t be true—the only reason Trump finds them credible lies to tell is because he and his people would behave improperly under pressure—in a hot minute—and they assume that everyone is as cold-blooded, cynical, and absent of ethics as they are.
But they are the aberrations, not Obama—and certainly not Susan Rice. I feel this aspect of Trump’s tweets has been overlooked—but it is an obvious and important aspect of his disinformation campaign. Only a man lacking any shred of honor could be so quick to assume that behavior in others. The media has already recognized that Trump always uses the word ‘fake’ whenever the news really hurts him—it’s almost a confirmation that they’ve hit it on the nose, at this point.
And during the campaign, he always had a ‘tell’—if you accused him of something true, he always accused you of exactly the same thing, in the same words, even. So, now that the glamor has worn off, Trump is pretty self-damning. We know what he accused HRC of, after she said it of him—Confirmed. We know which news he called ‘fake’—Confirmed. And we know how he views the presidency, by the accusations he makes against Obama—Confirmed.
And now he attacks an unemployed civil servant, Susan Rice—how long will we hear this nonsense, before we simply laugh in his face? I wish I could be in that room with Sean Spicer—I’d tell him what I think of his psychotic boss and his tissue-thin web of lies.
I’ve never had an ‘edge’, like my late brother—he was cool. He could be dismissive, confrontational, and disruptive—just like a rock star (and it didn’t hurt that he sang like a rebellious angel). That’s not me—I’m more of a gullible rule-follower with an annoying habit of obsessing over detail. And one of the rules I like to follow is ‘try to be positive’. When I write my dismissive, confrontational, and disruptive blog-posts about politics, I often tell myself, “You shouldn’t be such a downer—why not write about positive things?”
But I think I’m over that—you can’t write happiness—if there was anything to say about being happy, I’d have said it—but most happiness is too ephemeral (and too fragile) for words—it’s a feeling. Happiness is hard to share and impossible to write about, at length. Problems, now—there’s no end of things to say about problems.
And there’s no end of problems with today’s politics—leadership requires idealism, but the promise of power attracts the less-than-ideal. When Obama pushed through Affordable Health Care, he knew that it was a political misstep, but he did it anyway—because it was the right thing to do. By contrast, we have Trump recently signing an executive order to un-ban pesticides the EPA had determined were too toxic—and handing the pen to the head of Dow Chemical.
That would suggest that Trump favors business over humanity—but there’s more to it than that. Business can’t thrive in a place where no one makes enough money to have discretionary income (spending cash). Businesses can’t, in the long run, make a profit if all their customers are dead. Favoring business over humanity is a false equivalence—it is really a matter of preferring short-sighted greed over long-term reality, of ignoring warnings—not because they’re false, but because they are not yet true. Businesses love to project their future sales, but they’re uncomfortable with projections of reality.
That’s where science-denial and doubt comes in—they don’t want to admit that scientists’ warnings aren’t yet true—so they claim that such warnings aren’t true at all. Short-sightedness as public policy—for the purpose of immediate profit—resembles an addict grubbing for a fix. Capitalism becomes slow suicide. Socialism becomes the rehab we’re not ready to check in to. The partying continues.
Our niece, Joanna, is on a long hike and, in her blog, she talks about taking a ‘zero day’—which is when you cover zero miles for the day, i.e. a rest day. But when you’ve hiked the woods for weeks and you finally stop in town for a day, it’s hardly idle time—showers and laundry and hot meals seated at a table are just a few of the wonderful things about hitting a town while on the trail. So, it’s not a ‘rest’ day, per se, but a zero day.
It should surprise no one that hiking has a panoply of jargon—it is as much a different culture as it is an escape from everyday culture—I’m surprised it doesn’t speak an entirely different language altogether. Our niece commented recently that the hiking life, once normalized, seems quite like any other lifestyle—new expectations and new anticipations become habitual and life returns to what it was, pre-disruption (but with better views, no doubt).
Zero days seem to be what we are all taking lately. For most of my life the news was about what was new, and what progress had been made. But now the media never talks about anything new, and our government makes no progress at all—it is actually undoing the last six months of work, as much as it can.
Fatigue has set in, as well— it was frustrating enough to rant about Trump before the election, it has been beyond frustrating to rant about Trump since the election, and now that it’s come out that he and his inner circle may have colluded with the Russians, we don’t even know if there’s a traitor in the White House or not.
I think there is—and not just because he’s Putin’s plaything—although I tend to credit that intelligence—but for swearing to uphold and defend the Constitution, when he obviously hasn’t read it. So an ignorant, vindictive traitor is holding the highest office in the land and there doesn’t appear to be a single person in DC with a pair of balls. I’m not blaming the women—our female statespersons are doing what heavy-lifting is being done—but every male congressman and senator is being a coward in the midst of this country’s greatest crisis—Trump must be ousted before sanity can return.
In the meantime, I guess we’re all taking a zero day—the whole damned country. I heard that 10,000 women have signed up to be politicians—I don’t think that’s going to be enough.
We like to pride ourselves on our progress—we’ve conquered the apex predators with stones and bones, conquered the elements with clay and lumber, conquered hunger with agriculture and husbandry, conquered thirst with aqueducts, pumps, and plumbing, conquered winter with fire, and conquered boredom with the arts and sciences. Using these tools, we expanded our species from its niche-point to cover the globe.
Taking all that success as encouragement, we entered an industrial age, an atomic age, and a digital age—our control and manipulation of matter, energy, and other life is impressive. But there’s one thing we don’t control—ourselves.
We have laws, treaties, and understandings—but these are frail things that leave us still with a substantial amount of war, crime, and violence. We have some socialism, but it still leaves substantial numbers of children hungry, sick, uneducated, and generally underserved. We have some equality, but it still leaves substantial numbers of wealthy people able to take advantage of others and skirt the law.
We have a representative government—but somehow it fails to represent us all. As soon as the Constitution was ratified, self-serving people have sought to circumvent its spirit—two centuries later, they’ve got the whole thing pretty well hacked. Now, it is a joke, and we elected a clown who, evidence indicates, has no idea what it says in the document he swore to uphold and defend.
I could live with a venal president who wanted only to line his pockets. I could live with a conservative whose ideals are premised differently from my own. That’s democracy—but how does a perverted, ignorant narcissist get elected? Border-line-legal corruption and intentional confusion are the only answers. We are still waiting for the answer to the question of whether legality’s borderline was, in fact, crossed—and the crooks are in charge of the investigation, so we’re not holding our breath.
Trump is the poster-boy for our present day crisis—people need to have unity and inclusion. Patriotism, capitalism, tyranny, and secrecy are all opposed to unity—these ideas split us into ‘teams’ that work against each other and fear each other. Wealth also breeds disunity, making poor people resentful and rich people paranoid. This is a bad thing for a global community that is on the edge of climate change, habitat loss, resource shrinkage, and overpopulation—and anyone considering making the whole thing worse with a ‘limited nuclear exchange’ is just flat-out psychotic.
Income inequality wouldn’t be such a big deal if there were a bottom to the lower end of the income scale. If everyone could be sure their families had plenty to eat, public education, internet access, and all the other necessities of modern life—then having rich people driving around in fancy cars would simply be an annoyance, at worst. The reality is that these people take and take, in the face of millions who go wanting—and that’s sociopathic.
Capitalism was founded back when the class system was still the norm—that is why the vast majority of its participants, the laborers, fight even today to get their due—their nature was defined back when their equal value as humans was ignored. That is why capitalism, an inherently mathematical idea, became nothing more than a re-tread of monarchial rule. Capitalism allows us all a loophole, where we can ignore the Constitution (and all decent human instinct) in favor of owners’ rights and the laws of property.
Now, I want to keep my property as much as the next guy—I own a home on a piece of property, a car, appliances, and books and other sundries. Compared to most of the third-world, I’m in the lap of luxury—and I consider myself to be so. But there should be limits on property—if I had $85 billion, like the Koch Bros., I would consider it only fair that I disburse some of that money to other people, perhaps hungry children or college students who can’t afford their tuition. Just keep a few billion—anyone who feels strapped because they only have a couple of billion bucks is living in a fantasy world.
Financial institutions try to frighten us with ‘Cold-War’-like warnings of the Chinese or the Russians having bigger financial cannons—that’s nonsense. A more grass-roots, localized economy is stronger in the long run—and less likely to abuse its power. Greed will continue as major motivation for so long as we refuse to recognize the unfairness of capitalism—and greed, at this point in our civilization, is a fatal addiction. Unity is the only health food that can wean us off of greed.
So we must recognize that our government is infested by greed—and our mass media, too—and we must begin some sort of underground that circumvents all these broken institutions, without becoming just another problem in the mix. Human nature defies us to try—nothing has yet withstood the rot of corruption—even the great experiment that was America is frayed and torn. But those men in Philadelphia made a good jab at the problem—and perhaps our best tribute to them would be to try for something new, like they did, in spite of the odds against success.
When the world is in an uproar, it works for me—I can get riled up, even spending my life here in helpless, idle boredom. My head fills with blog-post ideas and I write like a fiend—and others are equally busy online, voicing their reactions to scandals and violence. What with Obama, the Tea Party and Trump and Putin, it’s been a riot of chaos and protest for years now—but I think the wave has broken. Trump’s tweets and rallies have become commonplace and dismissible, finally. We’re all just waiting around to see if Trump & Co. will be scoured from Washington by impeachment for treason (or maybe ethics violations, or whatever) or if his corrupt presidency will be allowed to stand for the full four years.
In the meantime, the crimes against humanity, and against the United States—in the form of Trump’s XOs and the GOP’s legislation—have piled up to a point where it would take a three-day seminar just to review them all. And our inability to reverse the course of our hacked democracy leaves us helpless witnesses to the most cynical corruption this country has ever seen. So a stunned silence descends—we stop interacting on social media for lack of a single ray of sunshine, we stop watching the news due it’s determination to keep things in the air instead of getting to the bottom of things, and we wait for a champion to rise among us and strike back at evil.
Fortunately, for most people, this means that spring, and soon summer, are upon us, and it’s time to get out of the house and have a little fun. Go out to lunch, go to the movies, head for the beach, maybe—a winter full of online bickering and Trump-watching is over. Time to get out of the house and out of our heads a little, finally.
But not for me—I’m still stuck in the house. Still, I’d rather see social media go quiet than have it continue the batting back and forth of lies, half-truths, and rationales. And no longer giving a good god damn what Trump has to say will hurt him a lot more than it hurts me—so go, have fun. Ignore that fucker until people with the access to our government can figure out what to charge him with, and eject him.
Take in the totality of all the existence around you
You’re there, too—right in the center
You can center yourself in yourself
Feel the beauty
Be the universe
Pray for rain
And dream of tomorrow.
Rest your head on the pillow
Let your breath come easy
Empty your heart of burdens great or small
Fill your mind with possibilities
Past, present, and future have their way
Be the stone in the river
Be the eagle on high
Be the one who hears the music
Catch the melody in the air
And dance in its stillness.
Saturday, April 01, 2017 10:16 AM
There—I’ve tried to be positive. It only works while I’m reading the poem—it doesn’t ‘stick’, as it were—but at least I tried.
Life is good—too good. When I was born, we could only gaze up at the moon—we couldn’t go there. Nobody had a computer, the phone was stuck to the wall, and the TVs were in black and white. Women were infantilized, minorities were openly persecuted, gays were institutionalized, children were beaten—not incidentally, as today, but as a matter of course. When people today speak of a ‘return to traditional values’ I look at them as fools.
And I also shudder. If I consider that we could easily devolve back to that evil—or worse, devolve into the violent upheavals seen in other countries—I realize that the goodness of my life is a fragile thing—a moment in time that could blow away like a leaf in a breeze.
When I watch Trump and friends actively try to make that happen, I smolder with rage—only an entitled little prick could be so cavalier with our hard-won progress. Only a sociopath could think that undoing the prior president’s work was his job. And how ignorant does someone have to be, to be the worst, most unpopular president in history—and not know why?
So I view America’s upward-trending awareness and conscience since 1956 as a miracle—and Trump’s taking a sledge hammer to it all in 2017 as a crime against humanity. Only decades of the greatest security and comfort ever known could reduce our citizenry to the impotent bunch of I-phone-starers that let this happen—and, unfortunately, only a great suffering will again steel us to fight back against the darkness. I’m thinking a ruined planet might do the trick. Or a world war. But I try to stay positive.
The repeal of North Carolina’s HB2 is no repeal—it simply removes the rally-point word ‘transgender’ from the new bill—which still allows discrimination and eternal foot-dragging by the State. In spite of pressure from colleges and businesses, nationally, who oppose North Carolina’s puritanical homophobia—at the risk of their own bottom-lines—North Carolina has reworded their bias into a bill that repeals only the use of the word ‘transgender’, not their control over who ‘goes’ where.
This is similar to Trump’s 2nd (and still blocked) Muslim ban, which changed only in that it removed the word ‘Muslim’ from the ban. The hate-fueled neo-cons of recent ascendance care nothing for the disapproval of the courts or the business establishments, much less the people they affront. Even when they get a rolled-up newspaper across the snout, they still try to hang-dog their way around them to resume eating their own feces.
And ‘bad dogs’ are an apt comparison, as they prove incapable of sensing their own immorality, turning puppy eyes on the nation, as if to say, “Why would you deny me this?” When Trump tweeted that he’d been ‘tapped’, he was trying to claim that having his peoples’ side of conversations with foreign-spies-under-surveillance should have been redacted. Even for Trump, that’s some childish hypocrisy, on the level of ‘wasn’t me—the cat broke the cookie jar’.
Meanwhile, he continues to kick down the sand-castle of Obama’s legacy—undoing both environmental and civil protections whose only crimes are that they annoy some entitled industrialists—and bigots who still resent having had a black president. The totality of the evil in Trump and the Republicans is overpowering—they haven’t a single decent motivation amongst them. We are literally being governed by our enemy—while they ‘investigate’ their own ties to the enemy.
I hope all you Trump supporters out there are comfortable with the term ‘traitor’—because that’s what you are, that’s what he is, that’s what making a “law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof” is. I won’t even be able to think of this place as the United States of America any longer, until and unless we get him out of there, and elect a Democrat majority to Congress in 2018. Until then, we live in the Trump-Reich.
I think Fascism may have been a temper tantrum that Western Civilization threw after their God died. They thought, “Well, we can’t worship the unseen anymore—let’s worship ourselves—or our leaders.” Capitalism, too, seems to have become a tawdry equivalent—“Money is life, so worship money above all else.” But the Earth has always provided us with much more than we give ourselves, or can buy with money—if worshipping Gaea wasn’t such an old, primitive meme, it’d get more play in the West. Instead, many choose Trump—a crossbreed of Fascism and Capitalism.
Still, we don’t need to worship the Earth—taking care of it would be sufficient—not poisoning it or chopping it down would do the trick. Ironically, that which connects us inexorably to the planet is the thing that makes us destroy it—we are animals. Born in blood and feces, breastfed, raised on roasted flesh, making waste, making babies, striving, fighting, and dying—take away the clothes and the gadgets, we’re just a bunch of animals. And when we’re asked to control ourselves, we claim ‘freedom’ and do whatever we want, instead.
It’s true—nothing makes me want to start a fight more than someone else saying, ‘control yourself’. Language becomes a cage, and when it starts to close in, we shout our way out. That’s what all that shouting on TV news is about—animals trying to break out of the cage of facts, rationalizing their predations as if their lives depended on it. You’ll notice that everyone stays calm until their reality is attacked—that’s when the confrontation comes, when they’re challenged. It no longer fascinates, or even frustrates, me—it just makes me sick and tired.
Trump and his gang make a big deal of manners—manners make it okay to condemn a statement without denying anything in the statement. That they are the rudest bunch of thugs seems to escape their notice, interstitially. They talk down to the whole country—but still puff themselves up and stand on ceremony whenever anyone else approaches frankness. I’d never thought of hypocrisy as a lifestyle choice before this administration came in. It’s endlessly embarrassing to see the depths of ignorance and self-service to which Trump, his gang of traitors, and the Republicans as a group, are willing to stoop.
It’s almost funny—if they weren’t so desperately self-involved, they could see for themselves how utterly transparent their cynical mendacity is to the rest of us. If there was ever a perfect example of the adage ‘be careful what you wish for’, Trump is it. That crowd of fools, who so ferociously rejected the female candidate, were just enough to get Trump through the Electoral College—and now that he’s in office, it seems that the delusional chaos of his campaign speeches is being transcribed to paper, as if he spoke with judgement instead of mere authority.
I can guarantee that a referendum, tomorrow, on President Trump would remove him from office—but we are so used to getting a usable President that we have no machinery to dispose of a broken one that snuck in by accident. Any other elected office would be vulnerable to a referendum, but when you’re the President, you’re the one who calls for it—I hope we’ve all learned a lesson here. Be more careful when you vote for a president, from now on. They ‘investigate’ themselves, once sworn in—when we should have done so, prior to the election.
But that stuff isn’t news at all—the sudden, precipitous rise in the level of lies and stupidity is a shock—but it’s really just the old way, with a super-charger on the Evil. Government has never been totally innocent or idealistic—but it’s insistence on the pretense of civility has worn so thin it’s transparent, or gone completely, really, when you see the Administration’s latest antics and mouthings. The treacly bonhomie that Sean Spicer was giving off today was more nauseating than his rudeness-fit faux-pas from yesterday—that clown is no actor—and I have no more stomach for smiling hypocrisy than for angry cynicism.
We have a representative government—but because of the Electoral College, our current administration represents the most resentful and ill-educated third of the voters—and the voters themselves were only half the number of eligible voters. At this point, we should make voting a legal requirement, like jury duty—sure, we’d be forcing the more irresponsible people to participate, but being irresponsible is better than being foolish enough to vote for that profiteering Russian puppet, Trump.
Another week, another bunch of stuff will happen—I’m gonna try not to get too upset about any of it. Used to be, if I didn’t follow current events, I felt I was being careless—now, the news isn’t so much ‘events’, as machinations.
Back in the Seventies, if a candidate was suspected of colluding with Russia, we wouldn’t still be discussing it on the news, three months into their elected term—we’d find out—and PDQ. And just what level of stupidity is Trump assigning us when he tries to characterize the incidental collection of info from his team, during surveillance of Russian spies—as him being under surveillance? Opposite day is over, Donny—turning the truth inside out only works during a campaign—not while serving in office.
Meanwhile, Trump is the hand we’re watching—while the other hand, the GOP Congress, pushes through crap legislation for their donors—dumping coal waste in local streams and hunting bears in hibernation. Who are these evil monsters and who the hell is dumb enough to elect them?
Public education, which made this country the greatest nation on Earth—and by example led every other country to higher literacy and science research—has become a libtard scam? Seems pretty clear to me what the real scam is—profiteer politicians who don’t care about our civic health.
And what’s this new BS about ‘accesses’? Access to health care, or access to education—is code for ‘you can buy it, if you have the money’. Nobody is fooled by this cynical word-play. Yet these duplicitous ‘conservatives’ still get equal time on the news to spread their completely transparent BS and misdirection. Even MSNBC, a supposedly leftist news channel, gives these hypocrites an unconscionable freedom to deliver their used-car-sales spiel all day, every day.
It is long past time for the news to stop representing evil as the ‘other side’ of an issue—truth will out—but if you run a cable news service, it will ‘out’ only between equal parts of lies. Those spin-doctors are slick—I’ll give’em that—but once their BS is deconstructed, it’s still blatant BS. Trump has really ridden that horse hard—that’s why he’s famous as the lying president.
Still, I can’t figure out why exactly it’s taking so long to settle this question of our president being a traitor. Is it because the case is really that complicated—or are we just too embarrassed to admit how badly we’ve been bamboozled?
There’s a new industry—information analysis for public consumption—you can see it in the deer-in-the-headlights look of recent guests of shows like The Rachel Maddow Show, The Daily Show with Trevor Noah, and Real Time with Bill Maher—people whose life up until now consisted of research, data analysis and synthesis, in quiet, dusty offices, are suddenly guests on a TV talk show.
Sometimes they’ve written a book, but just as often they’ve had an article published in a newspaper—either way, they’ve spent months, perhaps years, doing research on some overlooked, obscure, but important piece of our civic life. News today has a cornucopia of subjects, many of them medical, scientific, financial, legal, or something equally complex—and that complexity increases by an order of magnitude when we get down to cases—specific aspects of Antarctic microbiology effected by climate change, perhaps, or the difficulties of fighting the spread of Zika when each municipality has its own mosquito-spraying schedule.
And it’s more than an understanding of principles, either on laymen’s terms or as a professional expert—there’s an overabundance of data to deal with as well. Congressional bills run to the thousands of pages of legislation. Unmanned drones send back data from Pluto that will keep astronomers busy analyzing it for years to come. Wikileaks dumps thousands of pages of raw, hacked text and data—friend or foe, that stuff doesn’t index and summarize itself. Then there’s the galaxy of social-media texts, pix, likes, emojis, and what-all that can target-market, sociologically analyze, or just plain stalk almost anyone under the age of thirty.
There’s a lot of information floating around. If there weren’t, perhaps we’d have less trouble with the creeps that insert disinformation into the social conversation—misrepresenting a person or group for purely partisan aims. But it would seem that someone has to go looking for that stuff—I mean, the fact that it’s out there also speaks to the fact that a lot of people want their prejudices confirmed by an authoritarian media voice, no matter how shaky their journalistic cred. Their audience pre-dates them—they’re meeting a ‘need’, so to speak.
And the Alt-righters are not alone in seeking comfort. Americans are glued to their I-phones as much to hide from this frightening new world of information, as to make use of it. We can obsessively play video games or surf Instagram all day, take selfies or duck-pose ‘til our eyes bug out—that avalanche of information is still there—even if you don’t look.
The rich people started it—denying that smoking was dangerous so they could keep selling tobacco, denying that drunk-driving was a problem so they could keep selling liquor, and still denying that climate change is a threat when scientists are screaming in their faces. And if they can deny reality, why can’t we? Hey, new cars are expensive as hell—better to say ‘fukkit’ and keep the old gas-guzzler.
There’s much more information being denied than just climate change—the economics of socialized medicine (detached from the vested interests of existing insurers and drug manufacturers), the economics of socialized higher education (including the future cost of an tech-illiterate citizenry)—just name anything where an industry is making a good buck and you’ll find the conversation being steered away from anything that amounts to significant change. This is especially true of finance. And while the unseen machinations of lobbyists are certainly a big threat, the lack of free thought and public conversation about these areas is just as much a roadblock to change.
Some unpleasant folks like to say I’m ‘drinking the Kool Aid’. When Rush Limbaugh tells them that the New York Times is lying to America, but Paul Ryan is as honest as the day is long—then they tell me I’m the one that’s brainwashed—I really can’t respond. I might as well be trying to explain things to a cow. But, again, it comforts them to believe that they are right in their prejudices. It’s almost frustrating enough for me to want the consequences to hurry up and show themselves—if my words are useless, maybe reality can convince them. But that’s a pyrrhic victory of the worst kind—I get to say ‘I told you so’ while we all die—not much of a win there.
Here’s the problem—the world has gotten complicated—and crowded—don’t forget, overpopulation is still a global issue, even with first-world birthrates in decline—and we, instead of embracing that unpleasant consequence, are creating a world of doubt and rumor, where the nasty facts can’t reach us. But that is like avoiding the doctor when you don’t feel well—it’s a bad idea. While we’re putting off facing the problem, it’s just metastasizing.
I wish we could put all these fake-news-zombies to one side, and get everyone else to huddle up, and say, ‘look, we know this is real—fuck those people—let’s do something before we all die’. Wouldn’t that be nice? Politics today seems to be the art of avoiding just such a come-to-Jesus moment. And it’ll work fine—until Jesus comes to see us.
I think we need to take a hard look at the paradox of the Internet—its vulnerability to hacking makes it unreliable—so why are we in such a hurry to rely on it? As it stands, the Internet just adds another layer of confusion on top of an already confusing situation.
But the main problem remains the intersection of the power of government and the power of money—their relationship should be, to some degree, adversarial—the age of assuming that what’s good for business is good for the country is long past—and we need to face that, too.
I haven’t been blogging much lately—my health prevents me from exerting myself and it has been worse lately. My blogging, and the obsessing over politics that spurs it on, have really taken their toll—railing against the current tidal wave of lies and corruption for the last several years is a job for a young firebrand, not a beaten-down, disabled shut-in. The stress of watching America fall victim to its worst ‘side’ is exhausting.
Besides, I feel America catching up with me—why should I blog when I’ll simply be echoing the Wall Street Journal’s latest op-ed? With the majority of America up in arms over the reality of ‘Prez Trump’, my work is done. In fact, my obsessing over how we screwed the voting pooch is actually a step backward—and I lack the energy to keep up with the torrent of fresh lies and counter-lies from the alt-right, over TrumpCare, Russian-colluding treason, hiring his kids, and disavowing every non-shooting government program.
If only the alt-right could disseminate logic with the excellence they display in spreading ‘talking points’—imagine. The 37%’s latest jab is to tell me to keep ‘drinking the Kool Aid’. I can’t imagine what sources they use to determine that observed reality is the product of deluded followers of some hippy agenda. Neither can I fathom how these yahoos miss the fact that they support the wealthy 1%, when at least 36% of them can’t be a part of them—and will be just as poorly served by government cuts as we ‘kool-aid drinkers’.
Here are some thoughts from the past week that I hadn’t the strength to post before today:
Wednesday, March 22, 2017 5:00 AM
Politics? What the hell am I doing worrying about politics? Could I be less socially active? I don’t think so. Could I be further from involvement in current events? Not and keep breathing, no.
And all this time I’ve got piano music and videos of my granddaughter learning to crawl, as alternatives. Why I would waste a moment’s time on filthy politics is totally beyond me. I guess I’m just mad because it used to be safe to ignore politics—ethical failings on both sides and reluctance to change used to guarantee that elections wouldn’t mean much.
But the combination of lobbyist seepage and Russian bot-attacks have hacked our democracy—and now we have a huge disconnect between what the majority of Americans support and what the politicians claim needs to be done. And now, to quote John Oliver, the list of program-cuts scrolls up the screen “like the end-credits to America”.
What part of “Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof” is hard to understand? A Muslim Ban is as un-American as rotten-apple pie—it is the antithesis of the freedom we pretend to stand for. And it offers as much national security as a wall between us and Mexico.
The GOP want to cut social programs out of ‘concern for the taxpayers’—but they don’t intend to lower taxes—instead, that money will be transferred to military spending—as if America doesn’t spend enough on our military already. And a president that compulsively lies doesn’t help a bit. Paying attention to our present politics is intellectual suicide and I warn any sane person away from it.
That goes for the media as well—when they start trying to get our attention by saying ‘ten stories that have nothing to do with Trump’, you know they’ve long ago lost any sense of perspective. This is America, not the fucking Trump Show. Besides, what’s worse: an insane president, or a significant proportion of voters insane enough to elect him? We have the media to blame for both.
But which media did the most damage—the mainstream media, with its venal fascination with Trump’s idiotic rallies—or the alt-right media, with its delusional conspiracies and Russian Twitter-bots? That’s a tough call. Both doubled-down on their HRC-bashing (with a little help from Comey at the FBI)—one supposes because she was the only candidate with both a career-record and a coherent policy-agenda. Both failed to represent Trump as pure psycho liar and con man. It’s a tough call—we’d be our own worst enemy—if we didn’t have an actual enemy, in Putin.
Monday, March 20, 2017 6:21 PM
Angela Merkel gave him the well-deserved fish-eye—the Iraqi leader nervously tried to joke with the guy—Britain, as one voice, said he was patently ridiculous—are we embarrassed yet? Or does making America ‘great’ again include reverting to our condescending attitude toward every other country—which renders his buffoonery a moot issue?
So, let’s see, who do we not care about now? Well, there’s women, there’s poor people, immigrants, refugees, Muslims, minorities, students, old people, sick people, scientists, judges, journalists, artists, environmentalists, Democrats, and anyone who isn’t legally an American citizen, no matter where they live. Oh, and Trump supporters—let’s not forget how he wants to shaft them, too.
As fast as journalists, congressional committees, and intelligence agencies can put the lie to Trump’s tweets, he tweets out new re-hashings of those lies—if he wasn’t in the White House, we’d all be highly amused by now. As it is, unfortunately, we don’t know whether to impeach him for treason, impeach him for lying, or impeach him for insanity. Trump’s tactics abide—send a tidal wave of bullshit out into the media and let the adults scramble to align it (or not) with reality—meanwhile, who knows what evil nonsense is going on behind closed doors.
It’s very effective—as long as the GOP keeps its devil’s bargain with him—allowing his madness as long as he supports their vampire-like legislation. Should they ever awaken from their ethical coma, perhaps something could be done—but they haven’t finished using him yet.
I can’t say enough bad things about the Trump administration, or the Republicans who collaborate with him. I could simply describe what they’ve been doing, or, thankfully, what they’ve been trying to do (judges have, so far, held back his most traitorous executive orders). It makes my blood run cold.
And the evil goes so deep—first there’s Trump and his coterie—a ranker bunch of troglodytes is hard to imagine—but then there’s the Republican Congress as well, quietly doing even worse, more long-lasting damage to this country. Then there’s the barrage of hypocritical distractions—like Trump’s ‘Obama tapped me’ claim, or his wishful thinking about the media being unreliable. Then there’s the gutting of the State Department’s career lifers—the institutional memory of government—and the firings of Federal D.A.s—including the one who was investigating Trump. And the rolling-back of Obama’s last six months of legislation—for no reason other than it being Obama’s.
The perfect storm of a popular criminal winning popularity, the media’s lobotomy over HRC’s fitness to serve, and the extreme partisanship of the GOP, making them willing to go along with Trump’s mendacity—all of this puts our country in the hands of the worst bunch of cronies imaginable. One of these assholes actually used the word ‘compassionate’ when talking about cutting the ‘Meals on Wheels’ program.
I don’t think we can wait for grounds for impeachment—we need a national referendum on our confidence in Trump as head of state—followed by a special election. Otherwise, we stand on ceremony while this pack of dogs chews up America’s best furniture.
And that’s the trouble, isn’t it? You and I—we’re capable of feeling shame, capable of feeling a sense of responsibility, unable to see ourselves as better than our neighbor, unable to ignore ethics. What a disadvantage that puts as at! We’re like an old-fashioned guy, who’s too much a gentleman to strike a lady, facing off against a deranged bitch with a razor. We need to climb on our high horse, to strike down this monster with all the justifiable outrage of good Americans.
All that’s needed is a consensus that Trump is beyond the pale, that he is a mistake we made—we don’t need to wait politely for four years—we need to act. I call for a national referendum and a vote of no confidence in this pig masquerading as our leader. Or we can wait until they’ve done all the damage they can—and spend the next twenty years struggling to get back to where we were three months ago.
Mardi Gras, Pi Day, St Paddy’s, Easter… do you get the feeling that people are desperate for a party by the time winter finally starts to end? Yet here we sit, between two snowstorms—snowstorms that didn’t bother us all through January or February. But, hey—power’s back up, no harm, no foul—and who wants the year to go by without a little snow, anyway, right?
Lovely day today, however—sun shining, snow glaring—warm inside and quiet. Got some music I’m working on posting—can’t be too good or I would have done it already. The crossword was pretty easy for a Thursday. I’ve already watched two whole movies today—I can’t watch any more or I’ll get movie-theater-headache.
I could try reading, but that won’t help the headache situation any. Sure could use some new pics from the grandbaby—what a cutey-muffin. She makes me smile. And Jessy says her first tooth is just peeking through—soon she’ll be smiling back.
Well, shall we talk about the horror-show in our nation’s capital? I don’t know, they change the details, but there’s a sameness to all of this foolishness. They try to lie—the media calls them on it—they call the media dishonest—respected people side with the media—they move on to new lies. It’s frustrating and tiring—but I don’t see them getting much more out of it than we do.
I’m tickled by all the yahoos that say, “He’s elected, get over it”. Like their man, Trump, these people don’t seem to get it—being elected is just the very first thing you do. It is not an achievement—it is permission to achieve, or to fail, for four years. We’ve barely begun his first year and already grandma’s Medicare is on the chopping block—how does that create jobs, again? And about those jobs…are we waiting for a bill to outlaw robots? Because there won’t be any great job market until we put our technology into reverse.
Anyone who can look ahead and extrapolate what’s next can see that jobs are going to decrease, inexorably, down to none, sooner or later. The real issue is not creating jobs—it’s figuring out an economy without labor—how do we distribute wealth when no one works for a living—because no one needs to, because no one can.
You need to give those people money—otherwise the businesses won’t have any customers. Plus, having millions of unemployed, angry people wandering around—that’s going to cause problems—bad enough they have nothing to keep them busy—they’re also hungry. That is why Socialism is so attractive—Capitalism is based on the assumption that everybody works—it doesn’t function if computers and AI and robots do all the work.
I know it’s—what do you call that?—disruptive, yeah, disruptive. I know it’s hard to wrap your head around. But it’s one of those ‘Sherlock Holmes’ things—once you’ve eliminated every other possibility, whatever’s left, however improbable, must be the solution.
Let’s look at the history of books. The first books were written, and copied, by hand—there were very few books. Then the printing press came along—suddenly, there were lots of books—and no room full of copyists was required. So they were out of a job—they had to find something else to do. Then computers came along, and typesetters were out of a job—they had to find something else to do. Then the internet came along and all publishers and printers were out of a job—they had to find something else to do. But what? An entire industry disappeared—where are those people supposed to find work? And that’s just one industry—it’s not alone.
You can tell yourself that ‘there will always be jobs’—but that is not guaranteed. It is, in fact, unlikely. In spite of its effect on other businesses, the people who invent new computers, AI, and robots are working day and night trying to make better ones. They just invented a machine that picks lettuce, right in the field, cleans it, wraps it, and puts them in a box. How many farmhands just lost their livelihood—hundreds of thousands, maybe? And what’s left? Maybe three jobs, running and fixing the machines. But a lettuce-picker is never going to get hired to maintain the robots—so they don’t have a shot at even those three jobs.
Trouble isn’t just coming—it’s already here. Unemployment remains a problem—but no business is shouting for more manpower—they’re fine—which means we’re screwed, especially if we just sold our souls to the bank to get sheepskins. Might I suggest a degree in computer science?
The Ides of March are upon us. And how fitting, when here in the present our would-be empress was character-assassinated, leaving the throne to a pack of criminals. And how paper-thin their pretense at public service—a quick bill to allow coal-waste dumping in local waterways, as an appetizer for removing 24 million from health insurance—and gutting the EPA (something even that old crook, Nixon, saw the point of enacting).
In what way are these shameless epicureans serving the public good? In what world are we not being sold out to the moneyed interests? And does wanting a ‘change’ in Washington mean wanting more protection for the big corporations and less concern for the average citizen—along with a heaping helping of incompetence and malfeasance? How is it that legitimate leadership has never before required so many PR people to be expert liars?
I saw a few minutes of FOX News today—they were clawing at Rachel Maddow’s reputation for revealing some information about Trump’s tax returns—claiming that making a big deal about them was liberal hysteria. No discussion (that I heard) addressed the fact that he is the only modern president to hide that information during the campaign—and continue to hide it, even after taking office. Neither did I hear anyone question why that is. But, boy, did they have fun ragging on Rachel.
Not that we should expect much different from a guy who won’t even put his assets in a blind trust for the duration of his term—another break with ethical tradition. Listen, my dad used to put me in charge when he was on vacation, too—it didn’t mean it wasn’t his business anymore. Ironically, while Trump has become the world’s most famous liar, he gets very emotional about how we should trust him to always do the right thing—I’d like to see him do one right thing.
An objective observer might remark on how ‘bigly’ the Trump camp jumps on any error, real or imagined, from anyone outside their circle—yet they minimize any errors of their own as if the rules don’t really apply when talking about such important poohbahs as Trump. But hypocrisy is a big word—and remember—‘nobody knew how complicated’ it would be to be president. How much more complicated would it become if he were to attempt to be a good president? Please. Let’s be realistic.
Ending the EPA is such a disastrous wish that many people are reassuring themselves by thinking, ‘oh, Trump’s too incompetent to make it happen’. My concern is merely the fact that he wants to. There was a famous fire in NYC’s Triangle Building a century ago—many women were killed due to the fact that the owner chained the exit-doors shut. The outrage over that mass immolation caused a few labor reforms. But here we are, one hundred years later, and Trump wants to chain the safety-doors to the entire country.
In what universe is this pig making a successful pretense of leadership?
Blizzard today—trying to make up for a virtually snow-less winter—everything’s shut down—we cross our fingers that the electricity stays on. They named the storm ‘Stella!’, mostly so everyone could do a bad Marlon Brando imitation, I think.
The SCOTUS nominee is being heard today—the Dems have found a case where he ruled a man was legally fired after he deserted his broke-down truck in sub-zero weather. This sort of warm-blooded-humans-vs.-cold-blooded-cash dichotomy seems to be the real dividing line in politics today.
Bernie Sanders’ socialistic leanings are the one side of it—recognizing the dysfunctional aspects of Capitalism and having a desire to make government more humane and supportive. The Right wants money to remain money, should mountains of corpses pile up or not. Of course, they can’t be that blunt—so they go with ‘small government’—meaning a government that stands by and watches while business owners eat their fill of human misery.
And it isn’t their cruelty that disturbs me—it’s the mindless inefficiency of allowing millions to sink into difficulties—difficulties that will become a public expense, eventually—instead of implementing a significantly smaller ‘preventative’ public expense, up front. That’s the thing with the Right—they bitch about spending money on people, about ‘caretaker’ government—but they never address the costs, going forward, of neglecting those people.
The Right has taken education and health care and made them profit centers—and dysfunctional. College graduates start their careers as indentured servants to the banks—two centuries ago, you had to commit a crime to be treated that way. Still, it pairs nicely with all the for-profit-prisons that are reintroducing African-Americans to slavery. Surgeons and specialists hold out their hands for money, like maître de’s who keep out the riff-raff. To the Right, life, liberty, and learning are commodities to be paid for, or withheld. Inefficient. Short-sighted. And, yes, cold-fucking-blooded.
No wonder Trump is their idol—the most thoughtless, uncaring, authoritarian pig they could find. And don’t be fooled into gleeful celebration that Putin is now criticizing Trump—Putin wanted him in office because of the disruption he would inevitably create—now that he’s there, Putin is free to pile on with the naysayers—it even makes him look less complicit—so don’t be fooled.
But there is a strange beauty to the Right’s agenda—politicians who convince their voters that government is a bad thing—genius! Rich people who convince the middle class that the poor are the problem—inspired! Children of immigrants, in a nation of immigrants, that want to spend billions on a wall—to keep out the immigrants—incredible!
The Democrats, as uninspiring as they may be, are the only party that makes sense for a non-millionaire, or anyone who works for a living. That the Republicans can still make a pretense of representing the Silent Majority is indicative of our muddled journalism and our lack of education. The CBO estimates that 24 million people will lose health insurance under TrumpCare, but the GOP are rushing it through anyway—yeah, they’re on your side alright.
And with all the stumbling and bumbling in DC, the stock market still thrives—those people know what most voters do not—that the GOP is good for business, and will always be good for business, even if millions die.
I started out as an exceptionally intelligent person—but disease and CNS damage made me kinda stupid. I have trouble remember things or maintaining a line of reasoning for more than a few steps. I don’t argue with people anymore—I just assume that they understand things better than I do and defer to their judgement.
With one exception—I’m still smarter than conservative trolls online—these bastards log on and post their truly ugly foolishness, thinking they’re tweaking the beards of the intelligentsia—you can almost hear the ‘hyuk hyuk’ at the end—like Lenny in “Of Mice and Men”, crushing a mouse.
Well, technically, it’s not that I’m ‘smarter’—it’s just that the average Trump supporter is celebrating the dawn of the age of the idiot—their time has finally come, and they proudly display their ignorance as if ‘freedom of speech’ had magic dust in it. Then, doubling down, these dull blades take offense at being called stupid while they’re trumpeting their stupidity to the whole world—but I don’t let that bother me—tit for tat, bub. If they don’t want to be called stupid, they shouldn’t work so hard to prove it.
It’s ironic that these ‘tough guys’ who are so eager to let the poor starve, or die of treatable illness, have such delicate sensibilities when you call them out (‘let them eat cake—but don’t you dare hurt my wittle feelings’)—but if you want to make the world a darker place, strap in, because you’re going to hear from me, and you’re not going to like it.
We tell ourselves we’re living in a grown-up world but, every now and then, that ‘persistence of the high-school hallway’ bleeds through—and we find ourselves back in the world where might is right and ‘normal’ is dictated (and beat up the weirdo, for fun). We humans are contradictory beasts, knowing right from wrong, but not necessarily bound by that knowledge—they call it free will—I call it ‘people are assholes, sometimes’.
Does that sound bitter? I don’t see it that way. I think I’ve confronted the worst humanity has to offer and I have decided not to simply damn us all as hopelessly lost, but to characterize us, instead, as complex and contradictory. I think that’s pretty optimistic, really—given the evidence. In so many ways, this wonderful, modern world is just a few bad days away from a return to the Dark Ages. A lot of the conventions I’d like to think were rock solid, if I’m honest with myself, are relatively new and superficial—hell, some of them are younger than I am.
I was born two months after Rosa Parks was arrested. When I was a child, comics joked about women holding ordinary jobs, like policeman or construction worker. When I was a teenager, gays were still being beaten to death in public without the police getting upset about it. The world I’ve grown up in has gotten more and more enlightened with every passing year.
It is inexpressibly saddening for me to watch the whole thing start to swing backwards now. As our outer lives grow closer to science fiction, our inner lives revert to primitivism—in space we build laboratories—back on Earth, we kill each other while the true villains loll about in untold wealth.
Computers were a surprise, huh? I can still remember when I was the only person in the building who knew how to use one. Now that they’re everywhere, do we use them to streamline our government or make our lives more humane? No, we tweet. How disappointing.
Or how about the environment? I was in junior high school when Rachel Carson and Ralph Nader started to wake us to the fact that our burgeoning technology had consequences—that everything has a price. That was 1969—the year of the first Earth Day. Almost a half century later, the fat cats are still yelling that it’s not true—and that we can’t afford to save the earth, even if it were. Fifty years they’ve been saying that immediate economic disaster is worse than looming existential disaster—any sensible person would have used that time to prepare.
And I get it. We’re not saints, we’re not geniuses. We get through the day the best we can—and if the world is going to hell, what are we supposed to do about it? What can one man do? But still, as a group, humanity is embarrassingly stupid and suicidal. We all have our excuses—but we can’t deny the results, either. So, no, I haven’t given up on us yet—but only for lack of options.
Abortion has existed since ancient times. Earlier civilizations used certain herbs to terminate pregnancy, even before surgical methods were known. And abortion is still practiced today, even in countries where it is illegal. Like so many things, abortion happens whether the law allows it or not.
To imagine that making abortion illegal or unavailable will end abortion is the kind of simplistic thinking that causes more trouble than the issue itself. Shuttering Planned Parenthood, or even legally banning abortion, won’t stop abortions—it will only make them more dangerous and increase criminality.
Please note that I’m not advocating abortion—as a man, it’s really not something I’m prepared to have an opinion about. I’m advocating that we recognize human nature. Outlawing abortion won’t stop abortion. Defunding Planned Parenthood won’t stop abortion. Such things will only make it more dangerous and less controlled.
Don’t get me wrong—defunding Planned Parenthood will do something—it will take important health care away from women. If that’s what you want to do, then close it down—but it won’t stop abortion.
The history of our Prohibition era could teach us a lot, if we were willing to learn from history. Things like drugs, sex, and rock n’ roll happen, with or without legality—the only difference is that illegality creates an underworld, a criminal subculture that undermines local and federal government and increases violence.
Look at our DEA—initially an army against drug-abuse, now nothing more than a central focus of corruption and payoffs. Meanwhile drug abuse grows by leaps and bounds.
The thing these outlaw-crazy people miss is the fact that regulation is far more effective than a ban—it provides quality control, commercial control, age limits—hell, you can even collect taxes off it. And people don’t fight as hard against regulation as they do against deprivation. We have accepted this truth regarding alcohol, but for some reason we try to pretend that it doesn’t scale-up to everything else.
So you think abortion is a crime, an offense against God—whatever—I’m not going to try to change your opinion. I’m simply pointing out that abortion isn’t going anywhere—driving it underground actually ingrains it more deeply into our society, making it a cause instead of a mere service.
The stronger your sense of personal morality, the less sense it makes, to me, that you would want to take that personal choice away from someone else. If you think you have the right to decide what’s right and what’s wrong, how can you possibly believe that other people don’t have the same right?
If you want to disapprove of people who choose to get an abortion—that’s fine—you have your own morality—now you only have to learn to let them have theirs. Take that away from them and it’s only a matter of time before someone decides to take yours. This stuff works both ways, Einstein.
I’ve been wondering lately how we ever got to a point where our public servants serve themselves and still get people to vote for them. But then I remembered history.
The Native Americans didn’t get slaughtered overnight, you know—there was over a century of people giving lip service to humanitarian relations with the Natives, while others argued for White Supremacy, or Christianity uber alles, or whatever other rationale presented itself—or they simply snuck out at night and ambushed innocent Natives, without bothering with excuses.
Likewise, slavery was debated and fought over, long before the Civil War. And, as with the Native American genocide, good Americans sat around their breakfast tables, saying, ‘tsk, tsk, it sure is a conundrum’—and went out and voted for public servants that wanted to rid the land of Indians, or keep our Africans safely in chains.
So our entire history is one of good people, sitting around and discussing politics like a spectator sport instead of a battle between good and evil. Yet a battle between good and evil it has always been—and continues to be in the present. We vote our fears more than our beliefs. We are more easily frightened than inspired. And, sadly, we get the government we deserve.
Our present government is on the ironically-tragic side of being a joke. But we elected them. We even heard them say incredibly disqualifying things, then voted for them. They go on TV every day and embarrass themselves trying to call a pimple a beauty mark, or call a lie an alternative truth—and we support these con artists.
Yesterday, a profoundly stupid man named Scott Pruitt, recently appointed head of the EPA, remarked that he didn’t believe in chemistry, optics, or physics in general—more specifically, he questioned the greenhouse effect of CO2 in the atmosphere—an unquestionable fact. He was appointed to head the EPA because he could be counted on to either be this stupid, or pretend to be this stupid—and, in that context, he’s doing a bang-up job.
Americans have gotten into the bad habit of questioning the veracity of things they don’t like—and politicians, seeing this as a new tool, are leading the charge. Had they had the advantage of being raised by my father, they would be more familiar with the motto of normal people who don’t like an unpleasant fact: “Tough tomatoes”.
And so I offer this sentiment to all you fat bastards who don’t like the fact that the way you stay filthy rich is by destroying our society, our environment, and given sufficient time, even yourselves—you stupid brats. Tough tomatoes. Stop yer crying (and lying and pollution) and let’s all move on to a future where the inconveniences of science and truth are dealt with, rather than squirmed around.
How childish is it for Paul Ryan to respond to a question about what’s not in the TrumpCare bill by saying, “Read the bill”—when he knows that there’s nothing in the bill to answer the question either? That evil rascal needs a foot up his ass. But that’s the trouble—we voted for these criminals—and now that they are safely in office, they get to tell us, ‘tough tomatoes’—not because they’re right, but just because they can.
If any American ever votes for a Republican, ever again, it will be proof positive that we are all idiots and deserve to be inveigled by these fuckers for however long this country can last, without real leadership.
Snow covers every branch and twig, mounding on the evergreen shrubs and making the birds take two tries to sit on a branch, without a tiny avalanche. One timid chickadee outside our kitchen window almost cleared an entire tree, trying to find a safe perch. The cardinals are all fluffed up like nerf balls. I hope everyone got a snow day—or at least a delay—it isn’t as though this winter set records for snow days. And there are still a few days until spring.
Okay—this new health care plan is opposed by the Democrats, as you’d expect—but it’s also opposed by the AMA, health care providers, and conservatives (who think it not harsh enough). Meanwhile, all indications are that the only beneficiaries of the changes will be the wealthy.
Wealthy people used to be happy to be rich—they didn’t feel the need to keep everyone else in hell just for emphasis. But now, I guess, wealth no longer represents mere comfort and security—it means power—and what good is power if you don’t abuse it? How will they know we’re unhappy in our need, if they don’t do everything they can to make us suffer?
But even wealthy people have occasional need of an ER now and then—why would they turn all the ERs back into overcrowded homeless shelters? Don’t they even care about their own quality of life? Next thing you know, they’ll be claiming that they can’t afford to cart away corpses—they’d rather step over the dead bodies than waste money on meat wagons. Does becoming wealthy damage the brain, erasing the concept of ‘community’ from any mind that owns an expensive car? Or is it just that hiring enough people starts to make you believe you own them?
These bastards are pretty quick with the tough love when they have no conception of tough. Spoiled little pricks with attitudes have seemingly found a way to get people to vote against their own self-interests—how mysterious. Is Paul Ryan’s shit-eating grin that effective? It was only a few months ago that we hand-picked these monsters—and now we’re all up in arms over how criminally incompetent they are—how does that happen?
In 1941, when our country was attacked, FDR told us the only thing we had to fear was fear itself. After the war, Truman assured us that the buck stopped with him. Eisenhower, a former general who knew about such things, warned us, in his farewell address, that a military-industrial complex was commodifying violence and leaching our strength during peace-time. JFK inspired us to reach for the stars. Johnson signed the Civil Rights Act. Nixon, while a crook, at least ended our military involvement in Viet Nam. Ford pardoned Nixon, but in his defense, he always pointed out that accepting a pardon was an admission of guilt. Carter helped us begin to accept responsibility for our effects on the environment and the planet. Reagan won the Cold War. Bush-41 freed Kuwait. Clinton defended abortion, saying it should be kept ‘safe, legal, and rare’, and signed the Family Medical Leave Act, and Don’t Ask-Don’t Tell—the first acceptance of gays in the military. Bush-43 enacted No Child Left Behind—an attempt to democratize our educational system. Obama recovered from Bush’s ‘great recession’, passed the ACA, and killed Bin Laden.
As you can see, every modern president has made a significant contribution to our nation and to the world. By being responsible, semi-woke leaders of the free world, they all used judgement, insight, and patience to achieve things that few people have the character and determination to achieve. And those presidents had educated, responsible legislators to work with.
So join me in having a good cry—those days are gone. America has been broken into tiny pieces by a bunch of selfish, ignorant hacks and poohbahs. The world laughs at us, as their ‘Igors’ go on TV and parse ‘alternate truths’ and unfounded libel against the former president. They hand us to the Russians for thirty pieces of silver. They rush to pass laws that allow coal waste to be dumped in our drinking water—but dither over ongoing lead-poisoning in Flint that is destroying the nervous systems of a whole generation of kids.
Photo by Eric Draper, White House.
These evil cynics and hypocritical truth-twisters don’t need to be resisted—they need to be lined up against a wall. They call themselves conservatives—but they only conserve their bank accounts. They call themselves people of faith—but the only faith they have is yours (if you’re fool enough to give it to them). They confuse governing with poker—where lying with a straight face is an integral part of the game. They have no ethics. They have no honesty. They have no shame.
(Official White House Photo by Pete Souza)
And me? I was proud to be an American. There was a lot to be proud of. And we were just about to go on to even greater things. My dreams are shattered. My heart is broken. I see only darkness ahead. Where did this sudden lobotomy come from? Can we really blame the Russians for voting in this clown? And, if so, can we really expect his cronies to uncover the truth in these investigations? And even if we nuked Russia tomorrow, would that rid us of the yahoos that shouted ‘Trump that bitch’? I don’t think so. The explosion of racism in this country of late is all on us—election notwithstanding, we have people being violently xenophobic at every opportunity.
Stupid people have decided that they have a voice. And they do—it’s the voice of stupidity—and I have a message for them in return—shut your fucking mouth you stupid fucking asshole. I want America to go back to when stupid people had at least enough sense to respect intelligence, even when they didn’t understand it. And for all those of you who’ve gone all the way past crazy, to science-denial—here’s a special message for ya: Go eat a bag of dicks. I want my fucking country back.
Trump’s ‘wiretap’ lie is an attempt to convince us that serious planning happens inside Trump Tower (and by extension, in the Oval)—but tweeting it without consulting anyone else on his staff proves the exact opposite.
I’m so deeply ashamed of my country and my countrymen right now—especially those who voted for the vile vanity who struts golf-courses as our head of state. That offense-against-decency-in-chief is backed by a gang of soulless, conscienceless Republicans who began the new administration by sending him a vital bill—allowing our waterways to be used to dump coal waste. That was their top priority—and a bill speaks a thousand words.
Now they want to rescind the legislation that offers health care to the underserved—sending them flooding back into the country’s ERs. These elitist vermin cackle to each other as they dismantle everything good they can find, while promoting whatever unethical, money-grubbing fat-cat sends a lobbyist to blow them.
Who needs the Russians? We have hate-filled voters and hypocritical politicians destroying the American Dream as fast as they can—denying religious freedom, denying First Amendment rights, denying science, and making some sort of new art-form out of bullshitting—as if blatant untruths are okay, as long as your TV spokespeople are sleazy enough to keep all their obstinacy-balls in the air until the break.
As if using the Citizens United ruling to pretend wealth spent equals free speech were not enough, they promote and support outlets of untruthfulness, called ‘alternate news sites’ (‘alternate’ is the new euphemism for ‘dishonest’) which they can then feed their own propaganda and hear it regurgitated back to them as ‘news’. Then they call the New York Times dishonest. And people fall for this blatant bullshit. It’s so humiliating—and the irony is that most of the voters and pols who are dissolving America’s greatness before our eyes are people who believe that American Greatness is something they were born to—not something that requires effort or engagement. Of course they bridle at the label ‘deplorable’—it’s perfectly apt—and they have to look it up.
For all his talk about making America great, Trump has patently never bothered to learn what America truly is or, more pertinent to a president, how America is supposed to work. But this is where Republicans can offer pointers on making up rules as they go along—they know how America is supposed to work—and they stay up late figuring out how to gerrymander their personal gain past the will of the people—or, failing that, using psy-ops-like disinformation to convince the voters to support their own persecution.
I suppose we should be grateful that these monsters are too selfish to work together as a team—they’re doing plenty enough damage just flailing around as independent self-servers.
The Republicans are dead meat. Sure, we were distracted by Trump and the Russians, but Trump is a Republican, and Putin works for the Republicans—so really, this is all about the Republicans. Trump’s ‘who-gives-a-shit’ antics allowed him to garner popularity votes—but he can’t sign anything important unless the Republicans put it on his desk. And the Republicans’ attacks on Obama’s last six months of legislation sound more like a list of crimes against humanity than any kind of political agenda.
While we stare aghast at their straw-man, Trump, we overlook their willingness to allow his cronyism, his lying, his criminality, his conflicts of interest—and his ties to Russia—to go unchallenged. Why? Because that idiot will sign whatever bill they give him—he’s a free ride for their darkest fantasies of corporate overrule and climate denial. Trump is a travesty—but these cynical goons in Congress know exactly what they’re doing. They know the difference between right and wrong—and they wouldn’t squirm on TV so much or be so reluctant to give a straight answer if they didn’t know they were guilty.
We even give their defensive guilt-trips cute names like ‘push-back’ and ‘spin’—but only the guilty need to modulate the truth. They mask their reluctance to confront their constituents by claiming town-hall attendees are too rambunctious—or even that those people are being bussed in by political activists—one of their many easily-disproven lies. How do they convince themselves these lies will be effective?
Well, they have a market for their lies—a support-group who strain upward, beaks agape, like baby birds waiting for any scrap of delusional thinking the alt-right drops down their gullets. I think this is the first time the ‘militia’ demographic has gotten a voice in American affairs—up until now everyone readily recognized them as treasonous malcontents with psychological issues.
Trump’s responses to his faux-pas have been, “I didn’t know.”; “This was started before me.”; and “Nobody knew it was so complicated.” Trump is an ignorant buffoon—but the Republicans stand behind him, to a man—supporting ignorance even greater than their own, knowingly, willingly, for cynical partisan gain.
I say no one should ever vote for a Republican, ever again, for any elected office. A Republican, from all current evidence, is a traitor to his country and to its citizens—these gerrymandering, scandal-grinding, science-denying, disinformation-addicted sons-of-bitches have got to learn that Americans will only take so much shit.
These are just a few of the horrendous bills the Republicans have introduced:
HR 861 Terminate the Environmental Protection Agency
HR 610 Vouchers for Public Education
HR 899 Terminate the Department of Education
HJR 69 Repeal Rule Protecting Wildlife
HR 370 Repeal Affordable Care Act
HR 354 Defund Planned Parenthood
HR 785 National Right to Work (this one ends unions)
If your senators and reps aren’t saved in your phone yet, text your zip code to 520-200-2223. You’ll get a text back with everyone’s contact info. It gives you Federal and State.
Call your House Representative and ask them not only to vote ‘No’, but to speak out against their party and its administration.
Trump supporters are too foolish to realize they’re being lied to. Trump himself is an ignoramus, a fool, and a crazy person—and not in a cute way, but as in a raving lunatic with a gun. The Republicans are hypocrites who, in their own quiet way, are just as toxic—more so, when we consider that Trump just flails about, while these jackasses are serious and considered about their demonic agenda. Lies are being told. Laws are being broken—or repealed, if they’re really good ones. Hate is being touted as national security. And the media is reporting on the tweets of a madman, just because he lives in the White House.
The majority of this country didn’t vote. Of those who did, the majority voted for someone else. Some people see this as chaos, but I see it as a kind of pressure cooker—somethings gonna blow, sooner or later. It’s just too crazy an environment not to pop out a few maniacs—and who knows what they’ll do in their hysteria? Who knows what I’ll do? Thank god I’m disabled—I can’t be tempted to anything ambitious, like insurrection.
But there are plenty of healthy, sane people out there—and they’re about to call your ‘crazy’, and raise you a ‘furious’—in the end, Trump won’t be impeached—he’ll be torn apart on Penn Ave by a howling mob. You can’t treat people this way for very long without getting a reaction out of them. They were too lazy to vote for HRC, but that was when Obama was in office and all was right with the world. Now they’re about to lose their schools, their doctors, and their trade partners—and an amoral scumbag tweets at them in the night. Hey Trump, I got bad news for you—the only constant is change.
I’ve got a new fad for the nation—every election, we vote for anyone or anything that isn’t a Republican. From now on, we think of Republican as a synonym for Russian. It doesn’t matter how much you hate the other guy or gal—if they’re not Republican, they get our vote. How’s that for matching your crazy with our own? Evil, greedy traitors don’t get a free ride anymore, not now that we’ve seen your true colors.
Americans are crazy. We started our country by revolution—and then decided we’d keep our guns, just in case, forever. If you think about it, to this day, if a state threatens to secede everyone takes it very seriously. Imagine—an over-two-century old union of more than fifty sovereignties—and if a single one of those states said, ‘we’re gonna secede’ no one would laugh. Even with the Civil War’s failed secession as an object lesson in how destructive that is—Americans still like to think of our country as a work-in-progress. States still like to think they are stand-alone entities.
It’s a natural mistake—look at Brexit—a union even greater than our own—and one of its strongest members sees no better move on the geopolitical chessboard than petulant isolation. The European Union may outweigh the United States, but they don’t have our experience—guys, you’re only supposed to threaten to do something as stupid as quitting.
I shouldn’t brag, though. With our new ‘alternate reality’ schism, I’m sure the citizens of several states would grab their guns and stand at the barricades, if Bannon told them to. And even without declaring civil war, the gun-related death-toll in America outnumbers the body counts of several military hot-spots around the globe. We love our guns and if you don’t like it, I’ll plug ya.
Which makes it kind of strange that military service is such a rarity in the USA. A very small percentage of our young people go through military service as a rite of passage. Enlistment and training were an assumed stage in any man’s life, in any country, for many centuries—a man who didn’t serve in the military was no man. This tradition stretches back to the coming-of-age rituals of tribal societies. And we have broken that thread.
Don’t get me wrong—I was turning eighteen the same year that draft registration was abolished—I was one of the first people to find out what it was like to live life without any contact with military training. And while the Viet Nam war was winding down, it was not yet over—so being left out was a good thing, as far as I was concerned.
And I’m not advocating military service as part of a healthy upbringing either. But the practical results concern me. With military training confined to the innocent bystanders of drive-by shootings—and that being pretty poor training by any standard—one wonders how well-prepared we are to deal with countries where military service is still the rule.
Not because they have bigger armies or anything—just because their young people have the harder side of life rubbed in their faces as a part of their life—and while that is extremely unpleasant, it is also very eye-opening. I think a lot of young Americans are walking around with droopy eyelids—and they are in danger of becoming caught unawares by others—not just on land or sea, but in science, in business, and in trade. And from what I hear, a few of them could use the exercise, also.
It’s natural for a sixty-one-year-old to go on about how kids today need this or that—and military training may be the worst possible choice. But it seems to me that America doesn’t need a large army—not today, anyway. So, enlisting a bunch of young people in a government program of a less-exclusively-military nature might be a workable idea—it would fit in with a well-planned infrastructure renovation program and have the kids leave with some job skills, too—kind of like FDR’s CCC program.
I don’t know. I do know that coming-of-age rituals are beneficial—they help confront young people with self-discipline and the rigors of adulthood—and prepare them to be serious members of the community. There are too many places for people to gather online—and not enough places where people literally gather—it’s easy for young people to just drift off and get lost. With some sort of civil service program, we could at least reduce those who drift off to those who really want to.
When we make it hard for young people to find jobs, we send a lot of good people down into cellars with bongs, where they wait for the world to come find them. What a waste of all that youthful energy and enthusiasm. This country’s aversion to anything socialist in nature will be its undoing in the end—some things are better achieved through socialist programs—that’s just a fact. But there’s always that handful of people who’ve found a way to make a buck out of the lack of a program—and they shout bloody murder about the reds taking over, as soon as you go for their rice bowls.
Of course, if anyone listened to me, I’d be eternally damned. The reality of such a program would be corrupt, inefficient, possibly even predatory, by the time the ‘serious’ people got hold of it. But if it was done nicely, people would actually benefit from it—and so would the country as a whole. Still, we have the Soviet Union as the ultimate example of a good idea that became a genocidal crime against humanity—so perhaps I should just shut up about camps for kids.
Today one of Facebook’s featured news-stories concerned a Trump tweet that accused President Obama of wiretapping Trump Tower. This is the sort of thing he used to confuse us with—we’d be so busy laughing at how ludicrous he was we’d overlook the delusional nature of such statements. But I’m not laughing at his antics anymore—and the idea of a president who tweets his paranoia is no longer amusing.
To begin with—if such a thing were true, it would be as serious as a heart attack—it would require investigations and charges and who knows what else—and it would certainly, at some point, need a shred of proof. So, any sane normal person would not make the bald accusation, alone—no, they would say, ‘I have this proof here that something bad was done.’ We wouldn’t even need to ask for proof—a sane person would recognize that such a libel requires it—if for no other reason than as a starting point for an investigation.
But Trump seems to be free-associating, as he did when he accused Obama of ‘founding ISIS’ (just breathe—count slowly to ten…) after Obama had correctly pointed out that Trump’s anti-Muslim rhetoric was promoting the extremists’ agenda. Trump’s just telling stories to his base—stories he knows they’ll enjoy—they don’t need to be true, or have proof. Trump saying it is the only proof his base needs, now that we live in a bifurcated reality.
Then there’s the question of what exactly Obama would get out of ‘bugging Trump Tower’. Normally, one might wish to know a rival’s plans and strategy—but Trump doesn’t have any—we’re still waiting on his Health Care plan, his Jobs plan, his Infrastructure plan, his Education plan, etc. In short, there is no intelligence to intercept inside of Trump Tower. His tactics are petulance and disinformation to promote ignorance—it’s no great secret. There’s nothing to bug.
Let face it—it’s a false accusation. False accusations fly out of Trump’s mouth whenever he’s threatened—and they are always a mirror-image of the threat against him. Hil calls him ‘unfit’ and suddenly, he’s calling her ‘unfit’. She calls him a puppet of Putin, he—well, you know the clip. When the media exposes his lies, he calls them liars. When generals criticize him, he says the generals are incompetent. If this were a comic book, he’d be the evil villain using a mirror-shield to defend against the superhero’s laser-gun.
And we notice. At some point, we realize—this is a confession—this is Trump deciding he’s been tagged ‘it’ and he has to run up to someone else and tag them, or he’ll lose. So we wonder—is this Trump worrying that a Russian-interference investigation is starting to look inevitable? Or is it something more childish—say, a reaction to the Obamas’ enthusiastic reception on their return from vacation?
We continue to be puzzled by the media’s willingness to broadcast Trump’s tweets as news—he has followers who have volunteered to receive his personal disinformation—why can’t we leave it at that? They got fed up with Kellyanne Conway’s inability to resemble truth or reason—why shouldn’t they conclude the same about our president? Does the dignity of the office actually legitimize bullshit? I hope not.
So, I offer a new nickname for our pumpkin-in-chief: ‘Bugsy’—a fitting moniker, once used by a gang of criminals for a criminal even those psychos thought had a screw loose. When will the GOP get tired of ‘winning’ this country into an early grave and cut themselves loose from this deplorable Donald? Hey, Bugsy—take it from me—you’re going to make history. And, yes, that is another comparison of you to Hitler.
According to the New York Times, Trump wants to add $54 billion to our military spending, saying, “We have to start winning wars again.” This sorry fuckwad doesn’t see a problem with wars—just with losing them. It may be difficult for those of us living in reality to understand what this drooling moron means when he spews his ignorance. I believe this particular tid-bit was meant to suggest that we will go to every hot spot on Earth and use American Might to slaughter everyone involved, thus ‘winning’. I guess when you’re that old, mere diplomacy and world peace won’t get your dick hard.
BLOTUS says, “Nobody knew that health care could be so complicated.” He doesn’t want to admit it was just him—so he says ‘Nobody’ knew. This is the beauty of seeing reality as a story to be shaped, rather than a true thing—you can adjust the facts to make yourself look sane. Every-fucking-body knew—and everyone has known for years and years, that Health Care was complex—only someone who completely ignored politics until last year could possibly have missed the fact that Health Care was complex—and guess who that sounds like.
I know that facts are unpopular nowadays—but here’s one: the ACA was based on a Republican governor’s successful state program—it addressed several injustices that existed in commercial health insurance, it saved lives, and the only way it could be improved or made more economic would be to put back the single-payer option that Obama was forced to drop when he pushed the bill through. That’s the simple truth.
But Republicans and Trump campaigned on the notion that the ACA was evil incarnate—a curse upon the nation. They wanted to repeal it so bad they could taste it. They passed repeal bills in the House like sixty-something times. We can see now why they were so desperate—people have gotten used to health insurance—they like it and they don’t want anyone to take it away now. It turns out that some people look on this evil curse as a blessing—who knew that keeping kids healthy would be popular with parents—even dyed-in-the-wool Republican parents?
But how can they rail against something for years—and then turn around and claim they had no idea how complicated it was? How can they justify ending a government policy so popular that twenty million people signed up for it—and without any kind of replacement? Trump went on to say that his Obamacare-replacement plan is going to be incredibly super-terrific—he doesn’t have one yet, but he knows that it will be terrific. Is that just his subtle way of reminding us that ‘terrific’ has the same root as ‘terror’? I’m afraid so.
But I’m not going to condescend to you, dear reader, as if you were some brainless Trump supporter. You know he’s an ignorant, confused old elitist who snuck into a position he is unfit for. You don’t need me to tell you that the GOP has to use gerrymandering to win elections because their priorities don’t include serving the people. You don’t need me to tell you you’re being lied to—you can tell the truth from a punch in the face without any help from me. I only write these posts because I’m consumed with a thirst for vengeance, just dying for truth and justice to make a comeback.
Trump’s statements, his behavior, his so-called policies—I see them as proof of treasonous criminality and incompetence. Others see them as something to vote for. That’s an incomprehensible gap in our perception of things. I believe that a quarter of this country is made up of people who had trouble with school, with comprehension and reading skills—people who’ve spent their lifetimes being corrected, confused, and condescended to by intelligent people.
They hate subtlety, they hate ideas and ideals, they hate science and math, they hate history and education—and most of all, they hate eggheads, nerds, brains, or intelligentsia of any kind—study and knowledge are the enemy to that quarter of our population—the quarter who see Trump as their champion. Trump told them it’s okay to stand up in public and be an idiot, to say something that three-quarters of Americans laugh at for its inanity—that being a perfect fool is nothing to be ashamed of—and they love him for it.
Of course, it’s a little uncomfortable to come right out and champion stupidity, so they rebrand intelligence as ‘being liberal’. Then they change it to ‘libertards’, to imply that thinking is the real stupidity (and to get away with using ‘retard’ as an insult without anyone being able to call them on it). Sadly, they condemn thinking as if it’s something they would never do—when the truth is that thinking is something they’ve never been able to do.
That quarter of our population got Trump into office—but they had help. The people who didn’t bother to vote (which was fully half the country) may not have been stupid enough to vote for him—but they were stupid enough to let it happen. I give them a D.
What do we mean when we say someone is ‘psychotic’? I don’t know anything about psychiatry—but I know it doesn’t mean misbehavior—we have criminal law to define what misbehavior is—and it even has conditions that attempt to separate crime from insanity—so ‘psychotic’, whatever that means to us, is not merely doing something bad. I’ve always assumed it meant disassociation from reality—perceiving reality in a way that is fundamentally different from sane people.
And we’ve seen several media reports recently that go out of their way to point out that psychosis, in and of itself, isn’t evil, per se. They give examples of people who are diagnosed as psychotic, but functional, meaning that such people can take care of themselves and don’t make a habit of hurting anyone else, but are nevertheless technically psychotic. That would seem to bear out my assumption that being psychotic isn’t the same as being a bad person.
I think, when we discuss modern politics, we often use ‘psychotic’ to label someone who thinks they have a good idea—and we recognize that ‘good idea’ as a very bad idea, the badness of which should be self-evident to any sane person. Thus Trump and most of his coterie are often described as psychotic—their ideas, if you can call them that, have been seen before, have been discussed before, and have been discarded as shortsighted, or just plain wrong, sometimes years or even decades before now. Their ignorance and willful blindness suggest someone with a malevolent agenda—and rather than call them evil traitors, we give them the benefit of the doubt—and say they must be crazy.
But these are our choices: evil, ignorant, or psychotic—they’re either doing wrong because they intend to, because they don’t know better, or because they fail to grasp reality. Not great choices. Rachel Maddow did a segment on this last week, giving examples of seeming malfeasance, or incompetence, depending on how much volition and knowledge you give them credit for. With each example she repeated the mystery: ‘Are they evil, or are they ignorant and incompetent? You choose.’ But she left out bat-shit crazy—and I can understand why she wanted to keep it simple, but she still left out a very real possibility.
And I can also see where a knowledgeable reporter would shy away from the question of psychosis. Capitalism is psychotic, when we consider that we are destroying our planet as fast as we can, meanwhile shouting to all who will listen that we can’t afford to slow down. American Politics is psychotic, when we consider that Trump won the election. Religion is psychotic on its face—the very definition of insanity—believing in something that there is no evidence of. And you and I are somewhat crazy as well—everyone is a little crazy, or a lot, depending. I like to think I’m only a little bit crazy, but who knows?
But a true psychotic is like a runaway robot—it will follow its programming, and it won’t slow down just because people start suffering or dying. It won’t adjust for outside input, peer pressure, ethics, morality, or any other reason—it will do what it is doing, and god help you if you get in its way.
And if that sounds a little too much like Trump and his administration, then you and I are in agreement. He may be evil. He is most certainly one of the most ignorant people ever to wield such power. But whatever else he is, there’s some crazy in there, too, no doubt about it.
Look at his life before politics—always skirting the far edges of propriety when it came to personal behavior, always skirting the far edges of legality when it came to acquiring profits, always dismissive of anything like ethics. Had things gone a little differently, Trump would have been campaigning from a jail cell, arrested for one illegal or perverted act or another. It is entirely possible his entire campaign was meant merely to give him immunity from prosecution for many actions he dismissed so quickly, while yelling that his opponent belonged in jail.
The fact that Trump University was found to be fraudulent, during the campaign, and even this clear indicator was ignored by his supporters—means that a good quarter of the country’s voters are a little t’eched in the head, as well.
Then there’s Putin—a murdering crime-boss who wormed his way into the Russian establishment and will kill anyone who threatens his primacy, now that he has it. Trump admired him openly during the campaign and now, as president, he urges America to ‘get along’ with this mafia thug. Crazy loves crazy, I guess.
But America is funny—we’ll do the whole four years with a madman in the White House—but if he takes off his pants and starts running around the front lawn singing nursery rhymes—we’ve got him. This is ironic since, if Trump were to do that, it would be among his most sensible activities—and his least harmful agendas—in the last year.
I’m tired of discussing it. I’ve been in meetings with people I respected, people who knew what they were talking about—and still, at some point you reach a time when you just get tired. How much more tiring it is to have an argument (I won’t dignify them as ‘discussions’) with someone who is speaking from an emotional, partisan obstinacy.
They trot out their syllogisms, their zingers, their disdain for other points-of-view, their outrage, hurt pride, and puffed chests—the tools of those for whom reason holds no fascination—just a lurking fear that calm, sensible thought will prove them wrong, and a blindness to their emotional attachment to maintaining the wrong, if that’s the case.
It reminds me of a story. I was hitchhiking on I-684 in a snowstorm, coming back north from a visit to a friend in White Plains. Four guys in a real boat of a seventies car picked me up. Their friendliness was greater than their care for their automobile, for the windshield-wipers weren’t working and the driver was trying to reach out his window and wipe the snow from the windshield as he drove.
Traffic moves right along on 684—we must have been doing sixty when the driver’s attention to the windshield caused him to stop paying attention to the road and he went onto the shoulder. The shoulder had deeper snow, and so pulled the car further off the road—the steering wheel, at this point in the snowstorm, had become more a suggestion than an instruction.
Soon we were basically sleigh-riding the car through a field full of saplings by the side of the highway—shearing their tops off as the car’s inertia plowed us unerringly towards some older trees—trees with trunks that would put a quick stop to even the largest vehicle. The car, luckily, slowed to a stop just a few feet in front of one such tree. We all breathed a sigh of relief that we hadn’t met the tree, and piled out to try to push the car back from the tree and towards the road again.
The car wouldn’t budge. We pushed and pushed and nothing happened. I got down on the ground and looked under the car. I could see that we had sheared off a healthy sapling’s trunk and the base of the young tree was not only jammed up into the carriage, but bent towards the larger tree we had just avoided smashing into. Five men with slippery shoes in the snow would have had a tough time moving the car had it been free to roll. But this was five men trying to push a car hard enough to uproot a small tree—while pushing a car.
I tried to explain the physics to my kind travelers—but I couldn’t express myself clearly enough to make them understand that we would have to literally lift the car off the ground to extract it from the spot it was in—I couldn’t even get them to look under the car, as I had. They wanted me to continue helping them try to push the car.
At the time, I felt more stuck by my inability to get through to my new friends than by the car being physically, inextricably stuck where it was. I’m not an alpha-male—I’m not the assertive sort—when I say things, I don’t shout or insist—I just say them. It never fails to surprise me that no one ever listens—it’s not like I’m wrong all the time—and you’d think people would notice that, right? But, no—no one ever says, “Hey, we better listen to Chris—he’s usually right.” I only got noticed when I made a mistake. In that way, I’ve always identified with Hillary Clinton—the smartest person in whatever room she’s in, but the last person anyone wants to hear from—and just let her make one little slip….
Of course this was all long ago, back when I had a pretty sharp mind—I’m wrong all the time these days—I live in a fog. Yet, I still see some things that seem obvious, even in my fog, that I simply can’t believe others don’t see clearly. I still get exhausted trying to argue with people who don’t think about what they’re saying, just saying whatever seems like a ‘good argument’ or a clever rebuttal—and fuck the big picture.
And I’ve found that most people are not at all stupid—even the Trump supporters are not as stupid as one would expect a Trump-supporter would have to be to support Trump. They don’t lack intelligence. They lack respect. They don’t respect reason—because they’re afraid of it—maybe having a hard time in school taught them that logic is not their friend—I don’t know. They don’t respect themselves—and that pushes them to reject any show of respect for people that know what they’re talking about—or even for the subject under discussion. Most Trump-support boils down to self-loathing, turned outwards towards the rest of the world. They’re basically saying, “I’m gonna make an ass of myself—and you can’t stop me, because I voted for the king of the ignoramuses—and idiocy is in charge now.”
The Russians support Trump. Bannon is a confessed anarchist who wants to destroy the government. Conway got so used to lying she tried to give it a name: ‘alternative facts’. At least ten of Trump’s hires since inauguration have been expelled due to unfitness. And Trump has claimed that a free press is the enemy of the people—if I was crook and a liar, I’d say the same thing. The Republicans—jeez, these scumbags—whenever one of them opens their mouths, I want to shoot’em for treason. How do these trolls get elected—are their constituents in a coma? What? I just don’t get it—and boy, am I tired of pushing this car.
It should be no surprise that the era of Trump has brought back a resurgence of Flat-Earthers—in the quest for distraction and chaos, no idea is too ludicrous. (And if Trump didn’t generate three scandals per day, our gaze might linger on one of his fouler failings.) Believing that the Earth is flat is kind of like a religious thing—it didn’t exist for the ancient Greeks, who knew better, and it doesn’t exist today, among most developed nations’ peoples.
The surface of the Earth is observably curved. If you watch a sailboat pass below the horizon, the boat disappears first—the masts remain visible for longer—this is not something that happens on a flat surface. If you send a perfectly horizontal laser-beam across the desert floor, someone a quarter of a mile away would have to hold a piece of paper ten feet over their heads to catch the beam’s reflection—that’s because the light is a straight line—the Earth’s surface is not.
The ancient Greeks did not need to see Earth from space to know that it was round—it is perfectly plain to see, from several simple exercises like those just described—not to mention the Moon—also visibly, patently spherical, is hanging in the sky half the nights.
But beyond this—we also have proof that Earth is not only round—but spinning like nobody’s business—the Coriolis force is what causes Foucault’s Pendulum to work the way it does (and why the water spins in a flushing toilet—clockwise here, and counter-clockwise in Australia. Without the Coriolis Effect, water would simply fall down a drain, not spin around it).
And there’s the question of why nights are longer at the poles—why we have seasons in the temperate zones—and why it’s so hot near the Equator. Ultimately, one has to stay indoors, both physically and mentally, to maintain a belief in anything so easily disproved as a flat Earth. I find that those who insist on a Flat Earth are not merely stating that single mis-fact—they are attempting to delegitimize Facts themselves.
In effect, it is a declaration that a person has the right to dismiss reality, for no reason at all—and that is the case—but the result, in a perfect world, would be a diagnosis of insanity, not a debate with serious people. In my youth, a person purporting the flat Earth theory would be told to sit down and shut up—we were busy going to the Moon back then, and had little patience with willful ignorance.
Now it is all the rage—getting someone to say something wildly stupid is irresistible click-bait to the so-called journalists of mass media—a Flat-Earther is money in the bank to them, regardless of how low it puts the bar of public discourse, or eats away at the fabric of modern society. And here is where we find the connection between the rise of Trump and the sudden resurgence of Flat-Earthers in the media. They both substitute attention-getting for intelligence-gathering. They are both subtle attacks on our way of life—perhaps too subtle for us to defend against. What do you think?
This world could be a beautiful place—we could all be working towards a happier, safer, more just world—so, how did we end up with a bunch of crooks in the White House and in Congress? How do the most ignorant, most thoughtless, most corrupt people come to power—especially considering that they all needed us to vote for them? How is that possible?
Well, for one thing—goodness is quiet. Evil shouts and punches and razzes its opponents—evil trumpets its false goodness to the mountaintops. Real goodness doesn’t do that—goodness is kept busy doing the right thing; it doesn’t waste time on PR.
Also, Democracy itself is a flawed concept—it assumed a sober judgement on the part of voters (an assumption that never held true, but fell completely apart last November). Democracy allows voters to confuse leadership with popularity—and Democracy makes elected officials cower away from unpopular but necessary policies.
No policy in America can ever be right enough to survive disfavor—which is why a ‘tax-cut’ is always popular but rarely wise. Policies get fought over in the media based on anecdotal memes, rather than serious analysis. Democracy is, in many ways, a political lobotomy. I don’t have an alternative to democracy—but being ‘better than tyranny’ is a pretty low bar—and when democratic dysfunction allows for tyranny, even that bar isn’t overcome.
The Electoral College was our founders’ only concession to popular idiocy—but the Electoral College is made up of people—people no wiser or more infallible than the voters—and, as in the recent election, even a minority-vote candidate with severe fitness issues can slide by them, like they weren’t even there. So much for the Electoral College. It’s official—the only thing the Electoral College does is make our elections less democratic—hence the clown with the least actual votes winning, this last time around.
I don’t think people see this as clearly as I do—I think a lot of Trump voters thought they were voting in a one-day protest against the establishment—none of them thought of their vote as a request to be led by a madman for four whole years. See, we’re a democracy—but once you elect someone—even a Trump—that person has awesome power that no protest can change—the only way to get rid of a bad politician is to wait for next election day and run someone else against them.
So, when we made a mistake with Trump, it was a four-year mistake—those voters made it impossible to get rid of Trump until 2021. End of story. Impeach him, you say? Well, his new AG is in charge of the Russian investigation—and was part of Trump’s campaign while the crimes were being committed—and refuses to recuse himself from the investigation! So, don’t hold your breath on impeachment—and don’t think Pence will be any great prize, either.
I believe that what really complicates politics is the spectrum of empathy—some people are willing to make significant sacrifices on behalf of the common good, i.e. other people; some people are only willing to make small sacrifices on behalf of the common good; and, of course, there’s the people who say, ‘I got mine, Jack’, and could care less about anyone else.
That’s only natural—but the problem is that government is not supposed to be about one person or one group—it’s supposed to be about all of us. Within that context, a spectrum of empathy certainly complicates things. But we are now in a fantasy world, where ‘all of us’ is considered an exclusive club—and immigrants, refugees, gays, women, Muslims, and African-Americans are not really part of us. It’s a sick paradigm created by a perverted fraud and traitor—whom we just elected. His idea is to improve our lives by discounting the value of the lives of others—I hate this fucking guy with every fiber of my being. It is ironic that Trump says, “America first” because he’s that stupid—and not because he knew it was the Nazi party’s slogan.
I’d like to say he’s ‘not my president’—but that is sadly not the case. He is my president—and I may never get over the shame of it. The rest of the world will mock us for rejecting a true leader, because she had a problem with her email account, for the next hundred years. I can almost hear them laughing at us from the other side of both oceans.
Why is everyone so excited about a new solar system 40 light-years away? Do you really think we’re clever enough to suss out interstellar travel, when we can’t even pick a president?
We still have a whole branch of government that does nothing but kill or be killed—but don’t worry—we only use our military when it’s absolutely necessary for national security, i.e. when the Wall fails.
And even though Jewish people have been around longer than anyone else, we still manage to teach kids to hate Jews—shouldn’t it be the Jews that hate us, at this point?
If you can’t look at a woman without undervaluing her or thinking of ways to mistreat her or take advantage of her—that’s not a definition of what it means to be female—that’s you, being an animal. But I get it—women are strong, women are powerful—they’re scary, and we men need every handicap we can heap upon them, to avoid being totally intimidated and outclassed.
Any man who can afford a suit and tie, and has the ability to have his voice heard on television—has no business commenting on the poor, the underpaid, or the underserved. Miss a meal or two, be ignored for a week—then maybe you’ll have the slightest idea about it. Until then, your entitled, elitist, overbearing, smug thought-bubbles are worse than useless and you should really be keeping that verbal embarrassment to yourself.
I’m all for guns—everybody should have them—especially kids. Take some kids, kids who’ll only be thirty-five or so when the rising ocean levels are due to wipe out all the coastal cities—give those kids some guns, and the address of the Koch Bros. compound. Second Amendment rules!
And let’s stop blaming Trump for everything—he’s an idiotic clown, yes, but he’s an idiotic clown who’s being propped up by cynical, wealth-grubbing Republican party-leaders and a willfully misinformed constituency. These suicidally foolish people maintain their support for Trump, even after proof that the Russians have their hooks in him, and helped get him elected. Oh yeah, let’s get that group of geniuses together and design that starship.
Ain’t it weird to sit around feeling attacked every day? Here I am at my desktop, nothing happening, yet every day I feel more and more threatened. And the truth is—I’d be more pleased if I were delusional—if it was all in my head. Sadly, it is not my imagination—cynical horror-shows like Trump, Bannon, McConnell, Ryan, and an evil host of others all get up each morning with no aim other than to screw the American public. And I don’t think they’re even working towards some end or trying to help their rich friends take advantage—I think it comes down to outright psychosis on their part.
These are sick people. They harried our fine previous president every minute of his eight years in office—and no amount of good could dissuade them from their simple-minded robotic attack on the ‘enemy’. They all lied about each other, all through their primary, culminating in the nomination of the lowest among them (which reminds me—what’s Ted Cruz up to these days?) and continued the lying-fest right through the general election, smearing HRC as if she had horns and a forked tail—and somehow enough people fell for their barrage of bullshit that Trump won the Electoral College.
So now we have these psychos in power—their psychosis has spread to the heartland, the non-urban middle of our country—as if those people didn’t have enough problems without making a deal with the devil. So now we have a situation where evil monsters have taken over—and cast a spell over many Americans, making them believe that they’re living in a fantasy world where things get better simply by accusing others—no hard work required, no change is asked for—we just have to punish the guilty and all will be well. Sorry, I don’t think so.
So we have unemployment woes, low wage woes, crumbling infrastructure, crippled educational systems, terrorists, and hackers—but these monsters, with straight faces, mind you, tell us that our highest priorities are taking away healthcare and banning abortions. It’s like living in an insane asylum. Elitism and gerrymandering have done an end-run around the Constitution, misinformation has created a zombie army of self-destructive supporters who couldn’t find their asses with both hands, and while the majority of the country disapprove of Trump, he keeps yelling that everybody loves him. What a tool.
Mismanagement can kill a company—Trump didn’t file for bankruptcy three times because he’s a wizard of management—he went bankrupt because he’s the kind of boss who throws his weight around, ignoring warnings and advice alike, until the wheels fall off—in other words, a bad boss—a terrible boss. Now, I’ve worked for bad bosses in my time—that was something many of us suffer through in the course of our career. But no one, ever before, has actually picked a bad boss, voted for him to mismanage the whole country. That’s new. Maybe someday someone can explain to me how people can be so enormously misled.
Well, today settles it—I get maudlin towards the end of Winter. I start writing poems, I start playing piano in a minor key, I write bitter diatribes with far more than my usual cynicism. My taste in music gets a little weepy, a little dirge-y—I read more than watch TV. It’s a whole ‘Spring-better-show-up-soon’ depression-fest.
Also, I tend to write a lot more personal stuff—half of what I write this time of year is either too personal or too depressing to post—and I go on and on about stuff that I’m pretty sure isn’t driving the throngs to my blog—but that’s February for me. I’m fading fast—and I need some sunshine.
Well, things have settled down a bit—I’m used to either rooting for a Democrat administration, or I’m worrying about the one, really-big mistake that a GOP administration is currently making—I’m not used to purely dysfunctional—that’s a new one on me—and, I suspect, on all of you as well. But normalization is inevitable—short of storming Penn Ave, we’re stuck with the Clown until 2020—and the more avidly we stare, waiting for an impeachable offense, the less likely one is—‘a watched pot…’ and all that.
I’m still getting used to an America that is not actively trying to exceed itself—I’ll miss that forever, or until it returns, whichever comes first. Never before has a candidate won an election with a message of despair. “Make America great again”—I’d like to punch that fucker right in the mouth—the only thing that isn’t great about America is your benighted ass, you fucker, and the cowering, feebleminded jerks who voted for your sick agenda.
But let’s not get ourselves all worked up, every damn day, over the same old tragedy. What’s done is done. The odds on Trump sitting his whole term are long—one definite drawback to not knowing what you’re doing: you don’t know the rules. And while Trump may rubber-stamp some of the GOP’s worst legislation, they will find it hard to actually work with him—everyone does.
Fortunately for the Republicans, their platform was already custom-tailored for wealthy bastards with no public conscience—but they will inevitably try to mollify their base with something—and that’s where they and Trump will part ways. Trump’s penchant for blaming the establishment will ring rather hollow in 2020, after four years of being the establishment, so it’s hard to see him pull this off a second time—unless he actually does something.
But like most of his kind, Trump’s greatest ally would be military strife—even Bush-43 looked more dignified with Americans dying all over the place. Thus, it isn’t that I don’t want Trump to do anything—it’s that I’m afraid his ‘anything’ has some dark options waiting. Improving education, creating jobs, fixing our infrastructure—these would all be laudable accomplishments—if Trump can improve anything on such fronts, I’ll be glad to reevaluate—but I’m not going to hold my breath.
As much as I look forward to the coming of Spring, it will be all the more bitter for being a time of rebirth in an new age of tyranny—for 2017, T. S. Eliot will have got it right: “April is the cruelest month….”
Today’s poem and videos all contain cannibalized artwork from my one and only book of illustrated poetry, “Bearly Bliss”. It may seem ironic that my hand-tremors make me unable to draw, yet I still try to play the piano with the same hands—this is because I’m used to sucking at the piano, whereas I was once pretty good with a pen.
It’s February, it’s Monday, and I’m feeling fatigued—I’m tired of Winter, I’m tired of watching politics, and I’m especially tired of wondering why—did you ever just throw up your hands and say ‘people are crazy’?
Why do people see governance as a team sport? How does gerrymandering work—do all the rich people get together and decide on which crook is getting elected this year? Isn’t there a point at which even wealthy people say to themselves, ‘Jeez, what about our children, our grandchildren—what kind of future community will they live in?’
People try to justify their support of the Republicans, or worse, of Trump, but I never hear a lot of carefully reasoned objectives and agendas—I just hear a lot of anger and confrontation and defiance—and these people aren’t really mad at the Democrats, or even the Left as a whole—they’re mad that the world has become a place that belies their conservative nature. That the Republicans, and much worse, Trump, are willing to play on those fiddle-strings is a shame and an unexposed scandal.
Science is king. Defy it in small things if you want—but notice that you take an airliner to get to the rally, that satellites inform the GPS in your rental car on your way to the venue, and that the Internet has made it possible to gather a large crowd at short notice.
Science rules. It even controls our money—cash was already a mathematical construct, even as mere paper—a utilitarian fiction for the sake of liquidity, but now cash is stored digitally, magically, like a genie in a bottle—kill the science and you kill the cash.
Advanced tech keeps us all clothed and fed and safe and warm—kill the science and you find your family living in a cave—if they survive. People talk about the economy—about how we need money to maintain order and security. Well, you need science just as badly—and that’s just the existing science—that’s not even going into the question of what happens to countries that fail to keep pace with science, moving forward.
Yet science is under attack in America—it’s downright oedipal. Where’s the erstwhile pride in ‘Yankee ingenuity’, in being first on the Moon, in inventing the Internet? We have taught the world that the real Olympics, the truest of international competitions, lies in science and technology—how have we managed to lobotomized ourselves in the process? How did the country that invented Public Education sink lower in scholastic achievement than Zimbabwe? People are crazy—and I’m tired of it. Trump is a traitor, not just to America, but to humanity—but then, that just makes him one of the Rich, doesn’t it? O right, it’s Monday….
We get it—you guys love a good debate—if I had Kelly ConJob as my truth-squirmer, I would too. Spicer, as well, though no Kelly, has been described as “the M. C. Escher of bullshit”. So, let’s say that your delusional reasoning wins every argument—that still leaves the question of what to do. And, on that score, even “He won—shut up and sit down” doesn’t really cut it.
Let’s look at the proposals we’ve heard so far. At the top, there’s ‘build a wall’, which I consider more of a ‘what not to do’—it’s efficacy is questionable, over and above (if you’ll pardon the wall analogy) the question of the cost and logistics of the actual building. We made it through two centuries and two world wars without a wall—the crying need for it, here in 2017, still eludes me. And if America truly requires a wall, why are we stopping at one? Where is the wall for the Canadian border?
Then again, sea-walls on both coasts would actually be of use, in the global warming and ocean-level rises to come—why are we building a wall in the only place we don’t really need one? Never mind.
Moving on—we have the travel ban, the refugee freeze, and the repeal of Obamacare—but these are things being undone, not things we’re going to do. They all represent giant steps backward—and even if you don’t agree with that sentiment, there’s still the question of, outside of what we’ll undo, what (again) are you going to do?
Trump’s excuses for re-upping our carbon-footprint may sound like they are designed to bring back manufacturing and other jobs—but that’s not what they actually do—they simply make profit for Big Oil. The opportunities we are losing by our reluctance to embrace alt-energy industries is the real, long-term effect of his petroleum-friendly policies—and his bent towards commodifying education isn’t going to help the job market either.
It may be a misnomer to label Trump a traitor to his country. I suspect that wealthy people don’t see countries as rallying points in the way most of us do—they look at concentrations of wealth as the sovereignties of their world—and they’re not far wrong, though their patriotism is mere lip-service.
His continuing confusion of his presidency with a more familiar role, that of a commercial executive, is further indication that when Trump commits treason, he is ignorant of that aspect of his actions. He thinks he’s running a business, or worse yet, a TV show. Unfortunately, neither of these roles ever expects responsibility of its holder—except for the bottom line. And we’ve seen Trump’s bottom lines—often in the red—so, there’s little joy there, as well. Yet there are still those who insist they voted to put a businessman in the top slot—I might agree more fully if they’d specified a successful businessman.
Trump might have more readily caught on to the fact that ethics were involved, had he not become a member of the Republican party—but they are the Party of the Rich, so what choice did he have? As Vonnegut said, ‘we are what we pretend to be’. So, even if Trump is not the billionaire he pretends to be, he stills has to act like one.
In the end, I point out the lack of goals not to spur Donald to create some—truly, the less damage that a-hole does while in office, the better for all of us—but to point out its very comfortable absence from Trump’s agenda—he’s a fighter—he loves confrontation—but he ain’t much of a doer. His egotistic impetus to run for the office contained no vision of a better America—he only meant that, if elected, he would consider America great again—because we had elected him. And in this he is very much a Republican.
Actively dysfunctional—is that a thing? Do some people go through life thinking that their job is to screw everything up? Is it possible that people realize the fragility of the status quo—and some are actively making it as bad as possible? I mean, you wouldn’t think so, would you?—because it wouldn’t make any sense at all. But that doesn’t mean it isn’t happening.
People do lots of disruptive things—and for a wealth of rationales: to strike back at ‘authority’ (whatever ‘authority’ may mean to the disruptor—and whoever is picked as its representative)—or simply to feel empowered by being capable of disruption—or to use disruption as a diversion for something else that won’t bear close scrutiny.
This is something I don’t think a lot about. I’m overly earnest in thought and deed. It would never occur to me to kick over an apple-cart, because that would just mean someone had to pick up all the apples. I’m all about cooperation and efficiency—thinking otherwise, for me, is a trip across the line into insanity—but I’ve come to recognize that we all have our own sanity. Just because I can’t think of a reason to put a knife between my ribs doesn’t mean no one else is thinking about it.
Surely you have wondered, like I do, how we can reconcile the incredible powers of communication, where people from twenty distant parts of the globe can interact as if in the same room, with a globe that is such a shit-storm—how can this be? How can we have reached a point where we can do momentous things, as if by magic, but we don’t do any of them—because of the rules we’ve set up? What crimes do we commit against each other in our enslavement to Capitalism? Beyond poisoning the planet, that is—I’ll leave out the obvious.
I’ll grant you the fact that imposing order is easy if you don’t care about people’s rights or feelings, and a just organizational plan is far more complicated than trying to rule the world by fiat—but with modern organizational tools and our ability to transport materials and communicate with each other, it remains a mystery how we could be so shoddily led by our government, or all the world’s other governments, for that matter, absent a tremendous lack of will—or possibly even intentional disruption. I’d like someone to explain to me how we can make progress in every avenue—except that which makes government more efficient and transparent, life less scary, or people less helpless.
The whole world sits around while Aleppo is bombed into rumble, for years on end—and yet the whole of the world’s nations can’t summon the will to defy those two or three countries for whom all the deaths and blood and suffering are part of some cold calculation of power and profit. We have the technology to watch the whole thing on TV, in real time—but we act like it’s fucking Twain’s weather—everyone talks about it, but no one does anything about it.
And when the helpless women and children come crawling from the ashes—do we spring into action then? Oh no—those people are a threat—they might blow us all up at any minute. Let’em suffer.
I tell you—I wrote a blog the other day about how I am still embarrassed to be white—but I think it’s becoming more pervasive than that—I’m about to become ashamed to be an American. Too late—I’m already there.
I’m still in love with the idea, the history, the memory, and the dream of America—but I’m living in a country I don’t recognize—a country where hate and fear have become, somehow, popular—popular enough for them to elect a modern incarnation of Hitler. Truth itself—and Science, are both under attack by forces that can only be bent on disruption. America may recover some day—I haven’t given up—but I still don’t know how we got here—so how will we ever get back? It’ll take more than a twitter-war.
You think Trump is crazy now? Just wait until they try to tell him his term is over.
Supporters of Trump show similarities to evangelicals—blind faith, blindness to the truth, and an eagerness to pick a fight with non-believers. And I think we can put some of the blame for our political chaos on our collective blind spot—religion. Do you have a religion? I do not. Many Americans have a religion which they are deeply invested in—and many Americans have absolutely no belief in the supernatural—horror-, or Christian- based.
America believes in religious freedom and the separation of church and state—which is good in that it protects Jews, Muslims, Sikhs, Buddhists, Hindus, and atheists. The trouble resides in its protection of orthodox and extreme religious sects—anything short of public terrorist acts is permissible—including science-denial, misogyny, and racial discrimination—all features of certain, otherwise ‘legitimate’ religions.
Just as freedom of speech is sometimes misused—as when a neo-nazi’s public speaking goes unmolested—so, too, is freedom of religion misused to perpetuate ideas like those of Julius Evola (a hero of Steve Bannon’s) who was a little too radical for Mussolini, but is enjoying a resurgence due to Trump’s administration.
America made a great leap forward when it founded itself on the idea that religion was too iffy to form a basis for our laws or our government—where, hitherto, no government was without its state religion—a partner of the secular power structure, enforcing a deeper obedience than can be achieved by mere physical intimidation. Nonetheless, in separating the church from state, we only solved half the problem.
Atheism’s numbers are growing—now that we have ‘magic’ in flight, in medicine, in digital electronics, etc., we have less interest in the non-responsive magic of angels and deities. Open study of archeology and variant scriptures such as the Dead Sea Scrolls have given us a clearer picture of the human side of religion—offering proof that, even if the original supernatural encounters had happened, the leaders of subsequent sects modified the original faiths to meet the exigencies of change and power.
Over the centuries, changes in society and culture caused changes in religion—and modern findings of this destroy the monolithic, unchanging image that religion likes to project. If God were real, neither he (nor she) nor his rules would ever change—which makes today’s religions either false, or sacrilegious, i.e. false unto themselves.
We also have a much smaller world now—the different religions across the globe are used to being insulated from each other. But now, especially in America, one can have a neighborhood containing members of every religion on earth—and while religious freedom protects each of those faiths, it can’t protect people from noticing that these other faithful are blindly true to something entirely unconnected to that which they are blindly true to. It may seem a small thing—but the old joke is true: everyone is an atheist about all religions except their own. It is only a small step from recognizing that everyone around you believes in hogwash, to recognizing that you are in the same boat.
Aside from the competing magic of science and technology, and the pitfalls of ‘comparison shopping’ for religion, perhaps the most insidious threat to organized faith is our recognition of the hollowness of authority. Where we once looked to religious leaders and political leaders and respected journalists as authority figures, we rarely get through a month without one of these archetypes being indicted, exposed, or debunked. Today’s surge in atheism is just a symptom of a larger tendency to distrust those in power.
To me, the whole thing is an issue of being wishy-washy or not—you either accept the magical thinking of your faith or you don’t. You can’t have it both ways. If the afterlife exists, if souls exist, if God exists—then a lot of what we are doing is wrong—and we shouldn’t be doing it. I respect the Amish for their refusal to indulge in tech. I respect the Christian Scientists for their refusal to use modern medicine. If you’re going to believe in magic, don’t be half-assed about it. These religions with one foot out the door seem hypocritical to me.
But they are in the majority—and their dilution into something modern people won’t laugh at is a far greater retreat from faith than all the furor over abortion or evolution. Their own embarrassment is a far greater enemy of their faith than any argument we atheists can provide.
I remember when, as a boy, the Catholic Church demoted all the saints that were too close to fairy tales—my own name-saint, Christopher, and other popular saints like St. Valentine, St. Patrick, and St. Nicklaus—were considered too apocryphal to be included in the Church’s saint’s-day calendar. They were not entirely disowned or erased, but their high visibility became an embarrassment to modern Catholics, and they were no longer to be part of our serious rites of worship. That may be where the seeds of my atheism were sown—don’t name me after the guy who supposedly carried the infant Christ across a torrential river (the Christ-bearer) and then turn around and tell me the guy might just be a fanciful legend after all. That’s no way to cement my faith.
Times change—and religions change with them. The fact that times change slowly—and that each generation is presented with a religion as if it were a static foundation—has kept this simple truth from becoming an obvious fact—until now, when change is swift and communication swifter. Religion has become pitifully threadbare in modern times—the idea that a man can have a special connection to the eternal is hard to maintain when that man gets busted for pedophilia, or when that man decides that suicide-bombers are his favorite converts.
We are stuck now between a rock and a hard place—the Muslim extremists would be perfect poster-boys for atheism, if we weren’t so dead-set on pretending that there is a significant difference between one Judeo-Christian-Muslim faith and another. People even go so far as to argue that Christianity has never indulged in murder or terrorism—a patent falsehood that only reveals a deep ignorance of history—and not very ancient history, either.
To me, the most ugly, yet hilarious, paradox is that we, as a nation, are not ready to contemplate a presidential candidate who is an avowed atheist—yet we are completely unable to take a presidential candidate’s faith seriously. While ‘God will provide’ might make sense at home, it is beyond the pale when speaking of public policy. Reagan, Bush, et. al. were always at their most laughable when they reached back for their fundamentalist rationales to explain their decisions. And that’s overlooking the more basic paradox of one faith’s extremist becoming the leader of a multi-faith nation—or designating one faith as more quintessentially American than all the others.
Then there’s the darker issue—that, for many Americans, money is their God, and hypocritical playing on religious heartstrings is fair play, as long as there’s a profit to be made. Religion has been used as a prop for the powerful since the dawn of civilization—Karl Marx was very clear that he felt religion was used to keep the masses subject to state-determined morality. America is famous for having severed the direct link between power and faith—but such things have the ability to morph into other paradigms. We have recently seen many Americans embrace the return of faith as a political power-base—an ignorance that saddens any educated student of American history.
Religion fills a need. Even I, knowing that faith is an imaginary construct, still feel the lack of its warmth and security. My atheism has not made me feel happy or safe—I have simply had to accept that religion is false, and live with that. I even avoid promoting atheism, since I wouldn’t wish it on a happy believer. But when religion gets on its high horse, as if it were real, I am the first to rise in opposition. This defensive posture is a weak one—and the rise of atheism has spurred a sudden strength in the religious—but religion itself has weakened in its obsolescence.
So now we have a new president who got himself elected mostly through demonizing violent extremists of a certain religion—and pretending to support the more popular Christian one. No one is blaming religion itself for any of these problems—most Americans react to Muslim extremism by redoubling their faith in Christianity—even though their differences are minor details. The insistence on blaming Muslims for terrorism is a backhanded way of avoiding religion as the true culprit. Extreme religion of any kind always puts faith above reality, worship above humanity—and there isn’t a one of them that hasn’t descended, in the end, into bloody violence.
So why this blind faith in Trump—why do facts simply bounce off the Trump supporters? My theory is that religion has become too embarrassing, but people still need something to believe in—and Trump fills the bill. Like a god, he offers easy answers, no explanations, and an unbounded self-regard. Further, he sees no obligation to jive with observable reality. If you are an evangelist, or have evangelist leanings, in a world that is slowly waking up from the dream of heaven and hell, Trump is a perfect substitute. Plus, he allows you to attack someone else’s religion without even having to stand up and declare yourself a member of your own.
Okay, time to slow things down. Trump’s blitzkrieg of incompetence has the overall effect of forcing us to play his game, on his timetable. He does and says so many inflammatory, imprudent, borderline-illegal things that we simple folk are spurred into instant response—there’s never time for sober discussion—his stupidity is faster than light.
And while it may seem impossible to justify ignoring Trump and his minions for even one second—I sense that pulling back from his shit-storm of non-ideas, and taking the time to laugh at him and them—and to remind ourselves that life goes on, madness in the White House be damned—is the correct course. When caught in an inane conversation with a drunk, we don’t try to win the argument—we try to move away from the drunk—and this seems the sensible course in the case of Trump’s fascist Justice League of Losers and their obsession with media-storms.
Granted, Trump’s Electoral College win is a huge blow—in spite of the majority voting against him, he holds the presidency for the next four years—and that’s a lot of power for a crazy egotist. But the sub-set of Americans identifying as Trump supporters is still, in many ways, a far more ominous threat in the long term. These people are trapped within the echo-chamber of ‘alternative’, resentful, paranoid fantasies about how the world works, outside of their town.
Where their existence was once threatened by the ubiquity of information, the rise of biased information sources has now strengthened their grip on such self-excusing delusions. Bigotry is back in fashion. As long as Trump (and their portion of the Internet) reinforces their balky refusal to open their minds, they’ll feel infinitely justified in maintaining even the craziest notions.
These people have even been convinced to vote against Health Care, for themselves and their families. Think about that. It’s not far different from offering someone a juicy steak dinner—and them punching you in the mouth, like you’d insulted their mother.
You tell them the globe is warming, sea levels are rising, untold disaster awaits—and when their boss at the oil company, or the coal mine, sez, ‘No, it isn’t’, they dutifully jeer at the scientists. Scientists! People who make a career out of sweating the details—and who, more to the point, have no dog in this race—unlike their deniers.
I’ve seen regular people—not rich business owners or anything, just regular folks—who actually oppose the Minimum Wage. The sole purpose of a minimum wage is to make it hard for employers to pay you less than you deserve. Do these people think that the rule will only apply to immigrants—and even if it did, do they hate immigrants that much? How will they feel when their own kids can’t find work that pays their rent? Minimum Wage might start to look a little more attractive then.
So, in my humble opinion, there are some tragically, self-defeatingly, self-destructively stupid people out there—and a lot of them vote. For the most part, they don’t really oppose the changes that the Left promotes—they simply fear change—and that is their only real point of agreement with their leaders, especially Trump. Imagine a 21st-century American putting billions of taxpayer dollars into a wall—a big, stupid wall. Hasn’t he read Clausewitz?
A wall can be swum around, tunneled under, and flown over—if Trump’s idea was to stop immigrants, he’s a failure—if he merely wants to inconvenience them—good work, Donald, spend away. Although it should be noted that immigrants are no strangers to inconvenience. The act of building a big wall can be seen as less of a practical exercise and more of a desire for the world to be so simple. It is a statement more than an achievement—and those familiar with Trump’s pre-presidency resume will recognize this theme.
The sad truth is that rich people raise lazy kids—and rich countries raise lazy citizens—America maintains its preeminence by constantly blending in fresh blood. And if the newcomers are not creamy white, that is beside the point—they are eager—even desperate, for a chance to make something of their lives, and their families’ lives. They work like dogs. They take everything seriously. They listen to what’s going on around them. Basically, all the stuff that you and I are too ‘over’ being Americans to bother with.
These people prevent the rest of us from drowning in our own toxins of apathy and entitlement, selfishness and irresponsibility. They recharge the battery of America and they always have—our own ancestors were part of the process. Deciding to stop now, to shut it all down, to ban travel and build a big honking wall—suicide—sheer suicide for our country and ourselves.
Don’t take my word for it—look at Europe. A lot of those countries are accepting refugees, not simply out of the goodness of their hearts, but also because their populations are becoming too small and too aged to maintain their economies. They need immigrants—and the only reason we don’t is because we’ve always had them. We’ve never known what lack of change, lack of growth is really like—stagnation is foreign to us—but not for long, if we keep up this xenophobic nonsense.
I’m sorry—is my title “DeVos Wins Electoral College” a misleading, inaccurate statement that does more to confuse than enlighten? I thought that was how we were doing journalism now. My bad.
Name one reason to endorse Betsy DeVos. Senator Frankin nailed it—the $200,000,000 she and her family have paid the GOP—the one and only reason she was picked. She flunked her hearing—she was so unfit that even a GOP-controlled Senate had to bring in Pence for the tie-breaker. She appeared on television, demonstrating to the whole world that she has no experience, insight, or education for the job she’s supposed to undertake—and that she has become a partisan hack without having first even become a politician. We know she’s a hack—because if you or I were to embarrass ourselves so completely in public, we’d slink away in shame.
This could never have happened if Trump hadn’t already made Unfitness the hallmark of a Republican. But if a game show host is sufficient for the Presidency, why not have an empty-headed rich bitch head the Department of Education—it’s a free-for-all—don’t think about it too hard.
Trump is a fraud and a lecher. Bannon is a hate-monger. Kellyanne has a PhD in Pants-on-Fire—but, well, they all lie like rugs—she merely enjoys it the most. The Cabinet appointees are all shills for the wealthy. And every last one of these pigs, from Trump on down, is incompetent—they have no idea how to run our government—except perhaps as a game show.
The far right will make equally inflammatory remarks—but their outrage is based on delusion, or hypocrisy, or ignorance—not, like mine, out of disappointment that these con artists have hijacked a once-great nation—and that you Trump-supporting yahoos will cheer him on, as this country’s proud heritage dies.
But then, people are stupid. I’m stupid. You’re stupid. We none of us knows what we’re doing or saying half the time. We look at computers, space stations, and airliners—we think, oh, how brilliant we are—but those things were created by unique, educated, highly-trained people—individuals and small, tight-knit teams. You want to see how smart people in general are, as a group—just look around.
Banks make profit from indenturing college students. Prisons make profit from prisoner labor. Employers scoff at a minimum wage—as if having someone work for you all day doesn’t entitle them to live. People rail against socialized medicine, even though it seems to work better than the Insurance Industry’s idea of profiting from tragedy. And distinguished-looking farts in fancy suits will tell you that saving the environment is for sissies.
This is the wisdom of the greatest country on earth. Couldn’t make so much as a paper airplane with that bunch. And don’t point to that precious bottom line—money don’t mean shit when you’re choking for air, dying of thirst, expiring from the heat, or living in chains. If the economy can’t take responsibility for our survival, then the economy is a mental disease—beyond the mere stupidity, into the insanity of the mob.
How many of us are ransoming our children’s future for the sake of a paycheck? Too many, I’d say—since a bunch of people who live off of destroying the planet (like coal miners) will tell you that their jobs are much more important than global anything—but they’re not being selfish—oh, no. They’ve got ‘mouths to feed’. They’re wasting their time—if we don’t change soon, all those mouths will perish in a poison wasteland—so what was the point? It’s just math—how the hell do they politicize simple math?
Lots of phone calls and Facebook posts wishing me a happy birthday today—I’m glad everyone else is enjoying my turning 61—I’m of two minds about the aging process, myself. I think I’d celebrate a lot harder if I got a year subtracted from my age—but you work with what you have.
People pay a lot more attention to politics when it’s all going up in flames, as it seems to be doing right now. Back when Obama was being a competent president, with a firm grasp of world affairs, nobody gave a damn—there were even people who said, ‘I don’t know—I don’t think I’ll vote for anyone.’ Well, they voted without even realizing it, by letting the far-right win enough votes to elect Trump.
America doesn’t believe in the ‘Check Engine’ light—we worry about our problems only after the engine block has burst into flames. Well, the car’s on fire—are you happy now? The female half of this country is up in arms. The environmentally-conscious are up in arms. Anyone who doesn’t have pasty-white skin, or who talks with an accent, is up in arms. But Hillary had an email server—so what choice did we have, right?
The army of redneck supporters, ignorant enough to be taken in by the alt-right alternative facts and the subtle racism and the fear-mongering—those people are numerous enough to give Trump his electoral college win. But they are the least of it. The cynical power-brokers behind the scenes—the spreaders of the new fascism’s propaganda—are not the leaders of these shoeless morons. They are using them, not leading them—and they are using them to divert our efforts away from regulation, ethical watchdogs, and much-needed social programs.
The wealthy love the status quo—and all the suffering that implies. A real leader makes real change—and change is the enemy of the wealthy. They never argue this stuff head-on. They create a fog of controversy about a hundred little things, twisting the truth and stonewalling against accusations as if they really care—meanwhile, their true agenda carries on virtually unnoticed. It’s diabolical—but it’s working like gang-busters. For instance: Trump didn’t campaign on a promise to dump coal waste into our rivers and streams—but that is one of the first things he did.
Thursday, February 02, 2017 7:17 PM
Nation of Fools (2017Feb02)
In the early 1700s, the Protestant Huguenots fled persecution in France. These educated and successful people took all their skills and energy to other countries, mostly in Great Britain and the colonies. This ultimately weakened France and strengthened her neighbors and enemies—at a time when the exodus of nearly one million was not the ‘blip’ it is today.
Nazi Germany would make the same mistake—destroying the University system that had made Germany the intellectual hub of the world (although they would make deadly use of some of that scientific development) and driving the finest scientific minds of the day to foreign shores—many of them, thankfully, here to America.
Todays’ warning of the dearth of young scientists America now produces, combined with our new draconian xenophobia and divisiveness, shows the US seemingly poised to shoot itself in the leg, in like manner to Louis XIV and Hitler. And, truly, when stupid rules the roost, can we expect our brightest to hang around?
There is a cost to idiotic foreign policy, to populist-partisan domestic policy, to science-denial, religious reactionism, ignorance, bigotry, and especially to the dilution of rigor in public discourse. Those with the energy and brilliance to excel in society are not going to keep themselves in a dumbed-down America out of pride—not when our pride becomes transparent bluster and our legendary Yankee ingenuity is focused solely on such post-modern breakthroughs as the world’s biggest cement wall.
Where are booster rockets built? Russia. Where is solar technology being developed? China. Where is tidal power being researched? The Netherlands. Who’s building the electronics of tomorrow? Everybody but us. The question is: whose boot is most heavily pressed against the neck of America’s collective intelligence? Is it our school systems? Is it our politicians? Is it our ubiquitous media-trance? Why have we become a nation of fools?
Is the Internet nothing but a subtle form of mass lobotomy? When faced with dueling fact-checkers, is it not obvious that one of them is a lying, faithless scumbag? I give up. The world is too full of dogmen—humans are too rare. It is too cruel to teach me to love this country, sixty years now, only to see it transform itself into insane asylum.
I made a commitment to face down these drooling dogs of ignorance and hate—but I feel my determination flagging. Stupid is a powerful foe. And like an exorcist faced with a body possessed by a demon, it’s hard to decide how to exorcize the stupidity without destroying the victim—a lot of these people are not evil, per se—merely trapped in a web of alternative facts and fear-mongering that makes them zombie followers of the king of the brain dead—Trump himself. Telling them they are in error only hurts them, causing them to reflexively clutch their delusions to their breasts all the tighter.
Evil’s got us in a pretty tight corner, just recently. It’s ironic that I get some of them spewing the most outraged denouncements at me, when all I was trying to do is save them from their own mistakes. Granted, no one likes to be called an idiot—but for some reason I thought being brutally frank would help cut through the BS. I lose—same player plays again.
I was wrong. And that’s the tragedy—we’re all wrong, at least ten times a day. To err is human. But, when a group of cynical hypocrites start institutionalizing their own brand of self-serving Wrong—well, that’s evil—and those fuckers need to be exposed and neutralized. We use to rely on journalists for that. What happened? “They’re calling from inside the newsroom!” Noooo!
By and large, Americans self-identify with liberty, equality, inclusion, and a class-less society. But there are those so in love with their religion that they really don’t care for Separation of Church and State—America’s oldest and most important ideal. There are those who insist that one’s skin color does make a difference—and we just aren’t giving Separate but Equal a chance. There are those who say, “Of course, women are different—how can you say they are equal?”
There are those who think that Islam is fundamentally different from Christianity. (I’m an atheist and, trust me, they’re the same damn thing.) There are those who insist on owning a gun because it’s illegal to stand around in public with your dick in your hand. There are those who say we should mind our own business and let business owners piss all over our heads and call it ‘trickle down’. There are even people stupid enough to think that a 2,000-mile long wall on the Mexican/US border is a valid thought.
These people will tell you that these mistakes are ‘alternatives’. They will insist that Freedom of Speech gives them the right to be wrong in their own way. In former times, many stupid ideas were championed in the name of state’s rights—today, they are championed as the right of ignorant people to disagree with people who know better. It’s kinda the same thing. And in the Land of the Free, the voices of the galactically stupid do deserve a hearing—they even get to vote—it’s one of the pitfalls of the humanitarian approach: not condemning people for disagreeing—or even for their bottomless, willful ignorance.
Yet while these yahoos cannot be thrown in jail (our jails are busy founding a modern form of slavery, anyhow) they can be publicly contradicted by people who understand the intent of the Founding Fathers. BLOTUS, the champion of the galactically stupid, is not leading our nation—he’s leading the assault on America’s core values. He’s got his liar-in-chief, Kellyanne, and his Nazi-in-chief, Bannon.
But worst of all, Trump has on his side the most un-American political party we’ve ever known. They call themselves Republicans, but they are undeniably the Traitor party—their ‘rules’ change to fit the occasion, their facts ‘alternate’ to fit their PR, and their allegiance to the Constitution is like their allegiance to the Bible—they cherry-pick the parts that fit their unholy agenda, and dismiss the troubling parts as ‘typos’.
The fact that our liberal idealism is the only thing making their hypocritical, traitorous, money-grubbing, hate-spreading, and ego-stroking corruption possible—is entirely lost on them. They see Freedom of the Press and view it as an opportunity for Propaganda—they see Freedom of Speech and view it as on opportunity to Lie with impunity. They see rules meant to enforce fairness and twist them into a means to an end. And all the while they use their positions of responsibility to further their fortunes and power, never to serve the public good.
Trump hates Public Service—that’s why he ignored it for seventy years, and only got involved when he saw a shot at the high chair, grasping for power and fame in an office that, for over two centuries, has been filled by men of honor and responsibility. And now that he’s in there, he’s acting like a game show host—because that’s what con-men do, to distract you, while they’re rifling through your pockets.
This traitor and his gang have walked the extreme boundaries of credibility and professionalism, honing the public impression towards what we’re used to, while their de facto impact is an assault on what it means to be an American. They are helped greatly in this villainy by the fact that our ideals are subtle, fragile things which shatter in the hands of the disrespectful. Words can be twisted. Denials can be made—and false equivalences. Intent is the crux—and intent can be masked—is being masked, behind a barrage of bullshit the like of which this country has never before seen.
So that’s Trump—a traitor, pure and simple. But let’s move on to an even more unpleasant theme—those who voted him into office. What can be done to save these people from their own inanity? Mandatory Public Education? Maybe just to remind them what it’s like to have an educator at the front of the classroom, correcting them when they say something bat-shit crazy stupid. What can you do when people believe the lie and scoff at the truth? Will the dishonesty and willful evil of the empowered go unchecked, as it did in 1860, until we have no alternative but to start taking pot-shots at our neighbors and set the country aflame?
For most of us, the Right, the Truth, is always there, right in front of us. We are rarely confronted, personally, with the evils of bad government. We see politics as optional—‘if we had more time, maybe, or if something were to go really wrong, then….’ And then there’s the inertia of one day after the other, our little lives seeming to have little connection to the big doings in the halls of power.
But I find myself obsessing lately over that old adage ‘a stitch in time saves nine’. If we had voted better, none of this would be happening. We see it now, when it’s far too late to fix—but it was visible back in November, for those who cared to look closely. And this recent playing around with ‘the rules’—who are they kidding? They make the rules—and by they, I mean all of them. If the Democrats are not filing a thousand lawsuits, right now, then they’re part of the problem and have gone as far off the rails as the GOP.
I hear Democrats telling us to stay engaged—hey, how about some tit for tat? Why aren’t you people raising hell and a half, every day? Are you really okay with this assault on everything we live for, everything our soldiers, down through time, have died for? Is every civil rights victory for the past century to be wiped away by this monkey in a Chinese silk suit? We knew there were disgusting little rich bastards, hiding in the shadows, supporting ISIS for the distraction value of their bloodthirsty tyranny—but who knew one of them would be the President of the United States? Up off your lazy asses, Democrats—it’s all hands on deck time.
Okay. It’s Tuesday. All’s well here at home. Nothing to worry about. Remain calm. That’s what’s important here. Getting all worked up about what might happen or what tomorrow may bring—that’s all wasted effort—energy wasted that you may need, should tomorrow’s fears come to pass.
I can’t bring myself to watch the news anymore—a combination of not wanting to hear what’s really happening—and not believing half of what I see on TV, anyhow. And I can’t enjoy most movies anymore—I’m overexposed to cinema from a lifetime of movie fandom—and now, the new stuff is so facile, so puerile that I can’t sit still for it. So I’m left with books (not without its problems and limits), piano (ditto), and the computer.
And what of the computer? Here I am, typing away again. Talking to nobody—how is this different from having voices in my head—from being crazy? Well, it keeps me indoors, anyhow, instead of running through the streets screaming and pulling my hair out.
And who am I to complain anyway? My life is a bed of roses—if you leave out the crazy and the stress—and the world is full of people who would literally kill to take my place, here in a cozy, peaceful enclave of Upper Westchester, with all the trimmings—good food, dry and warm, soft bed, cable TV and WyFy—what’s to complain about? I live like a king—and I’m not even one of what you might call the wealthy. Still, to 90% of the people walking this earth, my life is cloud nine and only a crazy person would bitch about it, sick or otherwise.
Still, I think I deserve a few points for being sick. I used to be Mr. Happy Funtime—look at my face now. That’s the face of a sixty-year-old who’s had to fight to stay alive, to stay mentally there and physically upright, every minute of every damn day—and while it may look easier than holding down a full-time job, it isn’t. I’ve tried both—I’d gladly go back to 50-hour weeks as a systems manager if I could have my health and my intellect back—but that’s a dream.
What used to be that life, my life, ended decades ago. I’ve spent the time since about 1988 trying to survive cancer, chemicals, memory loss, and depression—all while having chronic fatigue and atrophied muscles—some muscles, in my abs, were even cut during the liver transplant—they just hang off my bones, unemployed but with nowhere else to go.
Thus, in spite of all the assholes who like to pretend that disability is a free ride for lazy people, the truth is that disability is a shit-show—those smug bastards wouldn’t last a single day of it, without crying for their mommas. ‘I work for a living’, they say—and you can just hear the smug. Big fucking deal—I’ve done work—it’s easy-peasy, compared to what I’ve been through—what a lot of disabled people have been through.
Imagine how bad off you have to be for the government to decide ‘Yeah, let’s just pay that guy money so he can stay alive.’ If you walked into Social Security with a splinter in your finger, they’d laugh in your face—and if you lost the whole hand, they’d still find you work. Me they just stamped ‘paid’—imagine the shape I’m in.
Not that I’m complaining. The rule is: if you go through a meat grinder and come out the other side still breathing, you’re supposed to be grateful that you’re still alive. So I’m grateful—get off my back. You go ahead and flit around—with your steady hands and clear memory and sharp eyesight and strong muscles and your sense of balance and your whole life to do with whatever you please—I’ll be sitting here, being grateful.
Don’t mind my bitter resentment if your mind is too lazy to crack a book, when my reading has gone from ten hours a day to three, tops, on a good day. Excuse my sharp criticism if my barely-held consciousness still has enough light in it to identify your confused, mealy-mouthed excuses for political acumen as the trash they are worthy of being called. And don’t be surprised when someone who spends his every waking moment experiencing the fragility of life finds your childish, locker-room jock bravado (masquerading as political ideology) so far beneath adult consideration that I lose my patience and call you an asshole. That’s just the way it is, bub.
No, there is no teacher at the head of the room—we are no longer schoolchildren. But when you’re wrong, you’re still wrong—and you know it—deep down in the bottom of that empty head, you know damn well that hate and fear and selfishness are negative forces that corrupt and destroy—and even the people on top, for now, will eventually suffer from poor judgement and bad leadership. And if you think you can just screw up the world and die, leaving others to suffer, think again. None of us gets out alive—but none of us escapes our fate, either. Karma’s a stone cold bitch.
Even you, Trump—when you stroke out, trying to do a job you aren’t fit for, think of all the criticism you’ll never be able to tweet back at—it’ll all just hang out there, unanswered by you or anyone else. And your tremendous ego, under the distraction of President Pence’s ascension, will dry up and blow away, never to bother anyone ever again. Well, I can dream, can’t I?
If people of a different gender, race, religion, or birthplace engender feelings of superiority and of fear—you should own that as your personal weakness, rather than try to legitimize it as public policy. It’s okay, you know—people don’t control their feelings, their feelings control them. Finding kindred spirits who collude in your rationalizations only encourages you to hug them more closely. The fear and ego remain clearly visible to the rest of us—hard as you may work to blind yourself to such ignorance.
Don’t work towards making your weakness into a part of our public discourse—work instead towards understanding yourself and these illogical feelings. And just because your daddy or your priest tells you something’s so, that’s just ignorance become a legacy of tradition—that doesn’t alter its incorrectness.
Stop looking around for enemies to blame—the torture inside you is your own. No one is going to find your happiness and make a gift of it to you—you have to find your own—and the answer is inside your head, not out there. Gripping tightly onto every external excuse, you strengthen your hate, increasing the distance between yourself and any hope of happiness.
The smile on a poor kid’s face isn’t due to he or she having all the things they want—it is there simply for lack of the bitterness and venom that experience is waiting to lay upon them. If we can gain experience without accepting the temptation of blame, we can retain some of that happiness, even into old age. People are not the groups they belong to—it’s pretty simple.
Human nature causes conflict. Individuals often conflict with each other. Trouble has many origins—categorizing people for the purpose of blaming groups only helps to camouflage the true causes of conflict. So when we seek to blame a group for a problem, we not only trumpet our weakness to the world—we actually strengthen the causes of our unhappiness, by masking them with ignorance.
The people who gain power and grow fat off of the status quo watch with glee, as all their neglect, posturing, and corruption get a pass—overlooked by the rest of us, as we foolishly fight amongst ourselves.
Sunday, January 29, 2017 5:43 PM
FB Comment:
Surely the humor of your argument doesn’t entirely escape you? We men eschew murder in theory, but will fight for our ‘rights’ or our ‘honor’, thousands opposing thousands, upon battlefields bathed in blood—it is justified. But a woman, about to lose her hopes, dreams, and plans for her future, due to an unplanned, unwanted insemination—oh no, there’s no justification for women to remove those potent cells before they become viable. Her fight for freedom is ‘murder’, simply because those cells have the potential to become a person. But all men’s actual murders—the heaps of corpses produced by war and whatever other nonsense we get up to—each dead body a waste of his mother’s nine months of travail, not even counting her raising to adulthood every one of the corpses—that’s all necessary, honorable, explainable. Men are justified—but not women. Funny, right? Try to be reasonable. I fear the theocracy you appear to dream of would be a little too ‘good’—for men.
Sunday, January 29, 2017 7:49 PM
What am I doing? I’m not teaching. Teaching requires a willing student—these people assume they know as much as I do, which may be true in a general sense, but not necessarily true of a specific subject. But that’s a fine point that goes by the boards—and with thinking that sloppy (and that’s the average, give or take) it’s no wonder that these back-and-forths on Facebook are such an exercise in futility.
The key is that word ‘social’, in ‘social media’. People type things onto social media in the same way that they converse—mostly for the pleasure of hearing their own voice. I, as a writer (of sorts) mistake all this typing for writing. I may be thinking very hard about what I’m writing, but nobody else is—they’re socializing, they’re having fun, they’re spending time.
No wonder they think nothing of saying the most horrifically ignorant things, but burst a blood vessel when I allow myself to be, shall we say, brusque. ‘You’re so rude! I don’t allow name-calling on my posts.’ You can be as big a monster as Trump, as long as you remember to be courteous at all times. But calling stupid by its proper name is beyond the pale.
I don’t think I have the patience for this. I got onto the Internet because people had begun to give me a pain in the neck, and interacting with other nerds as disembodied entities was fun. But now, everyone’s on the Internet, with pictures and videos and ‘brief biographies’—I might as well be hanging out in a bar, as far as the social thing goes. It’s worse, really, because in a bar you can walk away from the assholes. I’m one of the few people still doing this at a computer terminal—most people are doing this stuff by phone—so we don’t even have that in common any more.
You can see where the biased-feed problem comes in—I’d be glad to only interact with the people I like—but by creating a way for that to happen, Facebook has also created a dark space, where the ignorant and hateful can find each other, unify, and congratulate each other on how well they all agree. And that peer-reinforcement makes any kind of idiocy into a mighty cause.
FB Comment:
My resolve to confront Trump-supporters whenever and wherever has prompted many of them to decide they can’t stand the heat, and have blocked me. I know this because I see a lot of my friend’s threads, where they are debating someone who isn’t ‘there’. Apparently, these cowards only want to argue with friends who won’t be brutally honest about their ignorance. Well, if they support BLOTUS, I shouldn’t be surprised if they prefer their ‘truths’ censored and managed.
FB Comment:
I love these memes falsely claiming that Obama or Clinton did something equally criminal to Trump’s recent fuckups—the funniest part is, they seem to think that these false equivalences settle the debate. I guess they never heard of that ‘two wrongs’ thing….
Tuesday, January 31, 2017 3:38 PM
This whole social media thing is like a National Park that’s been overrun with so many tourists, discarding so much of their trash to the point where the beauty is hidden behind a lot of human garbage. The Religious Right started all this crap with their ‘teach the controversy’ BS—the PR version of covering your ears and shouting “La-la-la-la-la-la….” They, of all people, should know what happens when you start to deal with the devil. And if cutting yourself loose from science and reason is not making a deal with the devil, I don’t know what else could be.
Large numbers of people earnestly latching on to friendly-seeming misinformation being spread by a small group of hypocritical thugs—it’s not really PR anymore—it’s a lot more like Psy-Ops—as the Russians have apparently noticed, and jumped on board with.
Americans are used to fighting for liberty, freedom, and human rights—who knew we’d ever have to fight for the simple truth? And introducing such toxic mind-fucks into the seemingly harmless playground of social media—evil genius! Those of us who’ve spent a lifetime taking honesty for granted had better get our acts together.
Well, it’s become real—or is it ‘realer’? The first Trump administration counter-terrorism operation in Yemen has ended with the loss of a US serviceperson. Blood has been shed. We can all hope that Trump’s phone call to the grieving family will prod him into taking this job slightly more seriously, now. All this time, all this campaigning, and Trump is finally confronted with the fact that America is the arsenal of freedom—and freedom ain’t free.
Not that Trump is much worse than the rest of us. Will that fallen soldier be headline news all week? Or will he have sacrificed his life for his country while his country neglects to so much as notice, beyond a column in the New York Times? Will our armed services personnel retain their sense of duty and honor, while 99.9% of their countrymen obsess over inaugural crowd sizes, or repealing health care coverage for twenty million people?
Who would have thought that an elitist egomaniac who slaps his name onto any building he can find, in pursuit of brand-recognition, would discover that his name on a building (now that he’s the leader of a nation which ISIS is sworn to attack) makes that building a somewhat uncomfortable stopping place for most people? It’s ironic that his family’s businesses are now in a position of hoping that ISIS, Boko Haram, and others will repeal their fatwas against the USA and ‘replace it with something better’.
Then again, America’s pride in being ‘the land of the free’ is going to take a hit, what with Muslim bans, 2,000-mile walls, repealing women’s right to choose, and attacks on the fourth estate (if not facts themselves). Perhaps our armed services will lose their loyalty, not because they fall unnoticed, but because the country they defend no longer exists. Up until now, they operated on the premise that the tree of liberty must be watered with the blood of patriots (and tyrants—but let’s not get the Secret Service all het up). But without the tree, why bother with the watering?
If America becomes no different from any third-world dirt-hole, why would we even bother getting excited by the thought of invasion? Here comes the new boss, same as the old boss, right? According to Trump, our elections are a farce, anyhow—anyone who didn’t vote for him voted illegally—or whatever conundrum that fevered head came up with. So, we’re not really a democracy. Add in the voiding of the Constitution, and the trashing of our tradition of welcoming immigrants and refugees—and it’s not really America anymore, is it?
Just add a new SCOTUS appointee who hails from 17th-century Puritan Salem, as a cherry on top, and you’ve got a whole new country. All we need now are people willing to die for it, and people willing to live in it.
There’s only one thing that would turn Trump supporters back around as quickly as they jumped on his bandwagon—and he’s doing it. All that crazy talk during the campaign got his followers revved up—but only a lunatic would actually plow right ahead with all the silliness that sounded great at a rally, but actually creates major problems, once you’ve taken office.
That is to say, it was bad enough he talked so loose about serious issues, like some cartoon character, but to actually play fast-and-loose with the ship of state—well, all I can say is, ‘He’s gonna need a bigger goon squad’. And he’s not just re-arranging the deck chairs on the Titanic—he’s actively widening the gash in the side of the ship. But that’s a bad turn of phrase—America had been doing pretty good, all things considered—and, had a competent President been elected, allusions to the Titanic would not be involved—I should say, rather, that Trump is the iceberg itself, destroying one of mankind’s greatest creations, merely by sitting his fat ass in the Oval Office, where clear, deep water should be.
His most delirious grasp for power is his antipathy towards video evidence, photographic evidence, reliable information sources, and journalism. Trump really thinks that he can shape information flow so completely that the truth will remain hidden for the next four years. As with all his activities, one is confused as to whether laughter or weeping is the appropriate response. These alternative-fact worker bees on the alt-right can say black is white, night is day—and that will confuse people for a time. But their lies cannot change a person’s income, lies cannot create jobs, and lies cannot reduce the stress and violence that affects so many Americans they were willing to gamble on what they thought was a ‘loose cannon’.
I might have gone along with all that ‘loose cannon’ BS—if Trump were a real maverick, an independent spirit with his own ideas about the status quo. But that is not the case here—Trump does not have his own ideas, he has delusions—Trump is not an independent spirit, he is an entitled bully who mistakes his wealth for validation. Britain is struggling to crawl out from under their big Brexit mistake, but we have to own our big mistake for four long years—no do-overs.
Still, remain calm. Once Trump gets bored, he may just sit around tweeting for the remaining three-and-a-half years. One way we could help make that happen is if the media stops giving him their full attention. After all, they could rightly point out that they are not in the business of interviewing people who always lie to them and insult them—and that’s a pretty accurate description of Trump’s administration. They could still report to the people—all they’d have to do is report on what the Congress is actually cooperating on with Trump, what other departments and agencies are being affected by Trump’s directives, and how other foreign leaders are reacting to him. They don’t really have to talk to Trump or his minions at all—especially considering what they’ve been getting out of them so far.
We know what Trump is like. How do you think he’d feel if no one came to the White House Press Room anymore, or bothered covering his ‘press conferences’, or giving him interviews? He’d probably feel almost as bad as he’s made the rest of us feel. Media, do the right thing—start giving Trump all the attention he deserves. And if you can’t do that much, at least stop putting his fucking lame-ass tweets on the front page every other damn day.
What Trump doesn’t understand is that “America First” sounds fresh and exciting to him—because no one else has used that phrase since the American Bund, whose motto it was, were exposed as Nazi fifth-columnists in the 1940s. “America First” has been—and to all appearances remains, as Trump uses it—the rallying cry of Fascists, Racists and Anti-Semites. Just because Trump is ignorant of History doesn’t mean it didn’t happen.
He compounded his ignorance by using this motto, mere seconds after taking the oath of office—which he apparently wasn’t listening to himself doing—because the oath clearly states that he is not to preserve and protect our boundaries with big walls—his job is to defend the Constitution.
And this is why it is dangerous to put a dummy in that office—America is not a patch of dirt that we love—it is a collection of principles written down by our founders. America is an idea—if you throw out the ideas, we’re just a patch of dirt, no different from anyplace else. Animals fight over territory—Americans fight to defend their ideas.
That is why ignorance in America always fancies itself as an ‘alternative point of view’—those who hear ‘freedom of speech’ as a simple rule, rather than a complex idea, will naturally use that rule to counter ideas against which they are incapable of arguing cogently. In the same way, the ignorant tell us, “He won. Get over it.” They do not see that having the Electoral College legitimize their mistake, making it official for four years, does not make their choice any less incorrect—or dangerous, sad to say.
I have even heard it said that a man who lies so profusely as BLOTUS may not be lying, so much as deluded enough to believe his own lies—which, to me, only begs the question: which is worse—a congenital liar or a raving lunatic? Well, fear not, America—by all evidence, it would seem that we have elected a man who is very much both.
What is so very striking about BLOTUS is how proud he is—I have always wanted to feel pride in my accomplishments, as any normal person does, but I never realized that it is possible to be proud as a personality tic, devoid of any cause or achievement. His dismissal of the real accomplishments of others, and of the nuances of allegiance to a Constitution, rather than a piece of property, are just the flip side of that empty-souled, dim-witted persona.
I’m exhausted from responding to alt-right trolls on Facebook. I know that nothing that happens on Facebook matters worth a damn—and I know I’m never going to change the mind of any of these hysterical jingoists. Still, with things as they are, whenever any of that pro-Trump idiocy appears on my feed, I’m going to keep on responding, contradicting and insulting the people who post it.
I didn’t use to. I used to look at their stuff and say to myself that no one could ever be so blind as to be taken in by the charlatan and his creepy minions. But the Electoral College has proven that I was wrong about that. So now, whenever I see a stupid, thoughtless post in support of criminals who just happened to get elected—I post a reply of my own. I don’t want to—I’ve got better things to do—certainly nicer ways to spend my time. But I will no longer let these lies go unchallenged—even in the wasteland of Facebook.
Is it wrong of me to insult these people? Under ordinary circumstances, yes, it certainly would be. And if they are truly so deluded that they believe in Trump, it’s actually cruel of me to torture them with my scorn. But a lot of these people are just feeling the oats of their misogyny, racism, nationalism, and plain old resentment over how shitty their lives turned out. The miserable irony of it is that they have been conned into staunchly supporting the very people that keep their lives so miserable.
Can you imagine it? These rich, powerful people—who can create major changes with the stroke of a pen—accuse the poor, the sick, the displaced, and the immigrant of causing all our troubles. These cynical pigs stand there, with their hands on the switches, their fingers on the buttons—and they expect us to believe that the most powerless, vulnerable people on this earth are causing the problems. It’s beyond tragedy—it’s even beyond farce.
Their eagerness to smear anyone who stands against them is a sure sign that they have no conscience, no real concern for anyone but themselves—they echo the true accusations we make against them, like little children—yet enough people were taken in by this childishness that he won the Electoral College.
So, I apologize to all you people who I may call Stupid (and other things) over the course of the next four years. Please understand that I wouldn’t insult you without reason—you have been stupid, you continue to be blind and ignorant to the real threats, and you show no sign of wanting to become un-stupid in the foreseeable future. If the situation allowed for me to be polite enough to ignore your empty-headedness, I would gladly let it pass—but stupid in a crisis is a real danger, and I don’t have the luxury of etiquette anymore. However meaningless and futile my comments and posts on Facebook may be, they are my only point of push-back against the cretins—besides, evil pisses me off.
Hardasses like to rag on the Arts as if one-tenth-of-a-cent on every tax dollar is going to kill them—meanwhile, they wouldn’t give up their Sunday football games if it were they that were getting concussed, instead of their ‘heroes’. These are the same bozos who want to institutionalize Islamophobia, driving hordes into the arms of ISIS just so they can hug their hate ever so close. I think we should relocate all the anti-watchdog advocates to Flint, so they can see what they’re pushing for.
George Washington did not lead a rebellion so that we could each sit back and say, “What about me?”—he was thinking more along the lines of “What about We?” Selfishness may be natural, but when overindulged, it becomes downright un-American—or should I say Trumpian? Listen to me, hardasses—you think you’re being tough? Maybe in a barfight—but in the world of ideas and understanding, you’re all a bunch of whiny little sissies.
You all think you’re so tough, being against the Other. But guess what happens when it’s your own kid—or anyone you really care about? All of a sudden, being gay, or poor, or sick, isn’t the crime you thought it was—suddenly, it’s just a human problem. We’ve seen it a million times—so don’t pretend you’re tough on the issues—you’re just unconnected to them, ignorant of the full spectrum of the human condition. You’re trying to make a virtue of being unable to put yourself in someone else’s shoes.
This clown you just elected president is going to embarrass you, just as all your weak-minded judgements ultimately leave you walking around in the emperor’s new duds. His first act as President?—Putting his wife’s jewelry e-store on the White House web page. Signs of things to come. I would have been shocked, if he hadn’t spent the last year showing us how stupid he is.
Excerpt from a friend’s email: “….Have a good day. I’m paying for a friend’s moped repair today. I who live on disability’s low end will help a fellow human in need on this day with no expectations of repayment. To me, this is how to spend inaugural day by helping a fellow citizen.
—Min”
Dear Mindy:
Is there a high-end to disability?
Yes, DeVos is a piece of work. Sen. Franken asked her if she and her family had donated $200-million to the Republican party over the last few years and she said yes. Then he asked her if she thought that had anything to do with her being appointed to a cabinet post and she very haughtily replied that she didn’t see any connection. Then he asked her some technical questions about modern educational methods and testing—and she had no idea what the hell he was talking about.
And all of Trump’s picks, really, seem to be that ‘special place in hell’ for each of the departments of government they’re being assigned to run—it’s Opposite Day at the White House. On the other hand, they match very well with the President who should never have been. And the Congress refusing to do full ethics reviews on his appointees jives nicely with the voters failing to disqualify Trump for his own ethics—or, I should say, lack of ethics. I have no special plans for today—Trump’s inauguration coverage will simply be of a piece with all the news coverage I never watch anymore.
It all reminds me of when I was a programmer—people respected me, at first, because they needed my help with a talking/printing machine that helped them all make money. But when I had made all the programs very easy to use and very reliable, people began to take me and the computer for granted—and all they ever did was bitch about the little inconveniences that came up—or they asked me to make the computer do things that a machine can’t do, etc.
America, in the same way, has run pretty smoothly for a long time—and we have taken it so for granted that we’ve elected a man who doesn’t understand the nature of government, the point of public service, or the importance of the Constitution. And I have to agree with you about doing a favor for someone today, as a form of protest—at this dawn of an era of blatant corruption and incompetence, a humane act of any kind is as much a protest as if you marched down Fifth Avenue with a sign on a stick.
And a lot safer, too. If you recall, one of Trump’s campaign promises was to shoot a man on Fifth Avenue in broad daylight.
Mid-January and the squirrels were chasing each other up down and around every tree, fence, and power line—as if Spring had come early. It’s hard to enjoy such unseasonably warm weather when it comes the day after the announcement that 2016 was the warmest year ever, which makes it the third year in a row of such record-setting global warming. Worse yet, the Climate-Ostriches are about to take power tomorrow—and they pretend global warming doesn’t exist—so that won’t help us reach any kind of quick conversion to alt-energy.
With four years to not only sit on their hands, climate-wise, but to dismantle whatever progress has already been made in making the USA a leader in global climate response—I’m very troubled. I wonder if Trump will reach 2020 only to find that Mar-El-Lago is submerged, along with half of Florida. We can only lose so much arctic ice before sea levels start to really change—and Florida is especially vulnerable. Not that the entire Caribbean isn’t at risk—but shorted-sighted people need reality to knock on their own front doors.
Here again we see the problem of having too many problems. This climate-change threat is existential, not just for our nation, but globally. Still, we have a hundred other diversions—many of them serious problems also. But the media is not in the business of prioritization. They want to dazzle their audience with variety—not table some dry discussion on which problems need triage before we consider less weighty issues. And the incoming administration—a creature of the media, itself—does not appear to be in the clarification and prioritization business, either.
So we, the citizens, end up watching what amounts to an informational kaleidoscope on our viewing devices, snowed into the inclination that it’s all just too much, rather than getting angry at the lack of leadership—or progress of any kind—from the government. The GOP can’t admit to climate-change because it would make Big Oil unhappy. The GOP can’t admit that Obamacare should be amended, not replaced, because it would make their base realize it was all politics to begin with—not to mention Big Pharma and the Insurance people seeing their profits curtailed. I can’t tell you why they won’t leave women’s health issues to women—that will forever be a not-very-mysterious mystery.
The whole migrant thing—and that ridiculous wall idea—is all pure xenophobia—playing on people’s fears, and their desire to blame the ‘other’ for their problems. Mexicans have been coming and going into America, ever since the places where they cross were still Mexico itself. And there is less traffic across the border now than ever before in modern history. The truth is that immigrants have been and continue to be a part of our economy and culture. The paranoia being pushed by the GOP is leftover panic from 9/11—a cowardly reaction that has already prompted us to two wars and a near-bankruptcy.
It’s about time we got over domestic terrorism. You’re far more likely to be murdered in one of the mass shootings that shame us, as a nation, on a constant basis. What is the point of our security people doing such a bang-up job of screening for terrorists—if the rest of us are still going to walk around looking over our shoulders, ready to panic at the first loud noise? When did we become so damn shy?
So, basically, we have the GOP—who have been sponsored by interests who prize the status quo—telling us we can’t trust the leaders that would work for real change. And now that the GOP’s in power, they’re just going to sit back and tell you that those problems don’t exist—or that privatizing everything will solve all our problems. ‘The money-grubbing is strong with this one’. I think you’d have to be very rich to try to pretend that Capitalism is self-regulating, self-correcting. The market may be self-correcting, in a narrow sense, but to say that Capitalism works better without rules is to confess that you have a scheme to rip people off.
If you were playing Monopoly with someone and they said the game would be better if we threw out a few rules, you’d know they were trying to cheat. Why is the same thing not equally obvious when these fat-cats whine about regulation? They quality-control their products—why should they be so inhumane as to suggest there shouldn’t be quality-control on their employees, their customers’ health, and the good of the community they operate in?
The naked greed and cold-blooded unconcern for collateral consequences was most blatantly displayed with the recent water crisis in Flint, Michigan—and those people still don’t have any clean running water. Anyone trying to deregulate or defund the EPA, or any other watchdog, in these dog-eat-dog times, is not your friend. Too bad our new prez is set to lead the charge to do just that.
The hypocrisy is thick enough to walk on. Lectures appear on Facebook, calling all liberals onto the carpet for not bowing down to the new god of Bullshit, our Pee-elect. I’m told it’s my patriotic duty—that’s it’s self-defeating to disrespect one’s President. As a good American, I’m supposed to accept the judgement of the American people and rally to our new C-in-C—except the First Amendment makes it my right—no, my responsibility—to speak out against bad government —except he lost the ‘popular’ by three million votes—except most Trump-voters didn’t vote for Trump so much as they voted against Hillary.
I know this because when, in my online sparring with Trumpsters, they still reach for that rebuttal—‘well, Hillary is worse’. Get this straight, Trumpsters, the election is over—all excuses from now on have to be made without your fantasy evil-Hillary as an ingredient. You can’t judge people for repudiating his taking office, if you’re still pretending it didn’t happen, too.
And that goes for the entire Republican Party—you goons have the floor, you morons have the power, you crabby farts are now in charge of what everyone else was ‘doing wrong’. While I don’t expect anything from you incompetents, your constituency is expecting real change. And don’t look now, but if you fail (that is, when you fail) there’s no one left to point your finger at. It’s all on you.
Besides, President Obama did a fantastic job—while being protested and disrespected like no other president in our history. So stop yer bitching about us libtards taking it to the Cheeto-in-Chief—if Obama’s legacy is anything to go by, it’ll be a healthy back-and-forth between opposing views. The fact that your ‘view’ is actually blindness to facts, reality, or fairness doesn’t mean you get to Nazi-ize the presidency, or make it a capital crime to insult that bag of crap.
I think I’m getting a handle on this thing—I’m pretty sure that by the inauguration, I’ll avoid my head exploding. But it’s a big adjustment—losing that reasonable, measured presence at the head of the nation. I had gotten used to the luxury of having the ‘final authority’ be a better man than I am. I had forgotten the patience I acquired while Bush Jr. chuckled his way through his self-actualized shit-storm.
My concern with Bush-43—I doubted he saw the longer game, the problem taken out beyond the short term, or seen in a wider context—I didn’t expect wisdom from Bush, but I expected a modicum of caution and restraint—as a person might show, when responsible for the fate of the world. And indeed it took him the full eight years to cause all the damage of his administration.
The thought of Trump in the same position made me panic because, in Trump’s case, never mind the longer game—he doesn’t appear to see the short game—or the nose on his face, in many respects. He compounds his ignorance with an unstable personality—which could light up the whole ball of wax, in myriad scenarios and in shockingly brief time periods. Once sworn in, I wouldn’t be surprised if he could outdo Bush’s mistakes by an order of magnitude, and in a mere eight months.
I haven’t decided which scenario frightens me more—the transforming of ourselves into neo-Nazi nationalists—or the various forms that World War III could assume. The irony is that now, when the Tea-Partiers have won through, I agree with them—no legislation should be passed for the next four years—Congress should do nothing until they have completed the ethics reviews of Trump’s cabinet appointees (that should take most of four years, anyway, if they do a good job of it).
I’m curious about how the Republicans are going to spin things, now that they have both Houses, and the Administrative branch, and their pick of Supremes—if the employment rate doesn’t rise, if wages don’t rise, if health care and health insurance costs keep rising—who are they going to blame then? I would consider the possibility of their success—if they had offered any clear vision of their version of things.
They’ve been knocking the Dems for so long, so fixedly, that I have to wonder if they’re capable of switching gears, of getting anything useful done. Their present focus seems to be on undoing the Affordable Care Act—most sensible people would want to have a clear model of a replacement first, but everybody has their own style, right?
And it’s all coming back to me now. That was Jon Stewart’s big explosion as a satirist—when Bush was President, if we didn’t laugh, we would have had to cry—and this is certainly still a temptation. But I’ve become so serious about all of this that I hardly see the clownish side of the Republicans anymore.
Plus, we are always tainted by the enemies we fight—in this case, Trump has absolutely no sense of humor—he thinks insults are humor, because he enjoys insulting people—he doesn’t realize that insult-comedy has to be clever to work. And we really can’t expect an appreciation for satire from a man who seems born to be its target.
And so, during this death-march of an election, I slowly but surely lost my own sense of humor. It wasn’t just Trump and his team—the news media as well became a vacuum of humor. When the Trump spinnerets tried to pass off his Pussy-Grabbing comment as ‘locker room talk’, no one behind a news-desk had the dignity or grace to laugh in their faces. And as I watched what should have been farcical, treated with leaden gravity, I lost my sense of humor along with my sense of sanity.
But I’m getting it back now slowly but surely—as people are wont to do when they pass through what they used to see as an upper-limit on crazy. I voted. I blogged. I argued with friends. In my tiny way, I did what I could. But it’s over now—and if I didn’t win my case, I have won the right to sit back and watch my warnings come to fruition. People have a thing about saying I told you so—but I’m fine with it. If you refused to listen and went ahead and cut yourself, I’m gonna go ahead and say I told you so. And, yes, I’m gonna laugh, too.
Trump has lied and connived himself into a position he has no business holding—and I’m going to ridicule him until he leaves that position. If he can make a joke out of this country, I can certainly make a joke out of him. Don’t dish it out if you can’t take it, Donald.
Honesty has gone by the boards—and it’s not just the Republicans, although they are, by far, the most avid spreaders of delusional misinformation. The lies that enrage me the most, however, are the shadowy racist ones—where they lie about African-Americans (especially the President), Mexicans, and Muslims—but they don’t have the guts to admit they believe in White Supremacy. Bad enough you’re a bigot—but a coward and a liar to boot? In the words of the PussyGrabber-elect: “Sad!”
The 2008 election of Obama roiled up a tidal wave of racist hate—but most of it was channeled into thinly-veiled bigotry disguised as political commentary. Nobody was fooled by this—did y’all really think we would take your bullshit at face value? I wouldn’t be surprised if Trump’s first act as president is to commute Dylann Roof’s death sentence. They’re two-of-a-kind, but Roof only killed nine people—Trump will kill us all.
Supporting someone with just half of Trump’s red flags could be, just barely, chalked up to pitifully poor judgement—but to support the entire Trumpster-Fire is plain old reactionary racism—revenge for a black man making it into the Oval Office—and getting re-elected. After Bush went to war by mistake and left the global economy in ruins, you’d think White Supremacy was a dead issue—if that’s ‘Supremacy’, give me a ‘2nd-class citizen’ any day.
But judgement is not the issue. To suggest that you voted for the Donald out of good judgement is to invite me to laugh in your face. We outlawed slavery. We outlawed Jim Crow. But the hate still runs strong in this country—and Trump rode it all the way to the Electoral College.
The most laughable part is when these racists suggest that Obama didn’t do a fantastic job as president. They ignore statistics, they have amnesia about Bush’s trainwreck, they insist that any evidence of Obama’s success is untrue—or they change the subject to the few mistakes he made. You try being President of this overcrowded kindergarten class for eight years and see if you make an error or two.
Then they pretend that this dirt-bag-elect can read a newspaper, or get through a whole briefing without getting bored, or recognize an ethic if one conked him on the head. Please. He’s a perve. He’s an entitled brat. His record of public service is listed here: ‘_______’. Anyone who would vote for this clown is not choosing him for his ability—they’re just voting against Obama’s legacy.
Too late. Obama will go down in history as a great man. Trump will make history too—but not the kind we want to be here to live through. No one with their eyes open is fooled by your cutesy-pie, I’m-not-a-racist, racism. Some days, I’m ashamed to have white skin. I hate the fact that people might look at me, and think I’m one of you assholes.
I’m waiting for the day when we can all look back and agree that making Hillary Clinton’s email-server a big issue was purely political—and that any sensible person would have said ‘so what?’ rather than passing her over for the craven citrus cretin. Unfortunately, he now has four whole years in which to perform feats which disgust and appall. Long after he’s given us more-than-enough cause to rue our dismissal of Hil, he’ll be piling further misogynous misstatement upon further malfeasance.
Why do I so confidently expect Trump to do wrong? Because I’m a student—I’ve always been a student. I’ve studied Trump. His past shows him to be a cheat in business, a bald-faced, shameless liar, a disrespecter (and accoster) of women, and a stone-cold racist and Islamophobe. And the campaign revealed (to those of us paying attention) that he doesn’t have clue one about American history, particularly in the area of civil rights—a stranger can tweet out any propagandist nonsense and Trump will re-tweet it, as if quoting Barbara Tuchman or Doris Kearns Goodwin.
Someone with his business history does have a familiarity with the law—but it is an adversarial knowledge, things he learned in the course of avoiding jail-time—that’s a different knowledge base than, say, a constitutional scholar, like Obama.
There’s a fascination factor, yes—people are mesmerized by his comfortable embrace of all things sleaze, the confidence with which he can insist that up is down. But lots of dangerous creatures are fascinating to look at—that doesn’t mean you let them out of their terrariums.
There’s only one real question about Trump’s upcoming presidency. During the campaign, he and his shills managed to spin the truth into a psychedelic hallucination—and get their lies reported as ‘real news’ by certain biased outlets (one cannot call them journalists). So, while Trump is doing the ignorant thing, the unethical thing, and the egotistical thing, he will be breaking rule upon rule—but whether or not the American public will hear it reported, and whether or not they will understand or believe what they hear, is (in light of the election’s shenanigans) an open question. I can assure you he will do wrong—I can’t say with certainty whether we’ll hear of it, or believe it, when he does.
Most people are struggling with the problem of whether or not to pay attention to a narcissist for four years. There’s talk of boycotting his inauguration (a no-brainer from my point of view—bad enough he’s being given the oath—don’t make me watch). On the one hand, the worst thing we can do is reward this pig with the attention he so desperately craves—on the other hand, he’s going to be in the White House—so if we pay attention, it shouldn’t be long before we have grounds for impeachment. He’s like a TV commercial—you want to ignore it completely, but you’re waiting for the show to come back on, so you don’t want to miss that the commercial has ended. We want to give Trump only enough attention so that we notice when he acts in an impeachable manner—it’s a conundrum.
President Obama’s Farewell Address last night was very emotional—he did his best to inspire hope for change, to remind people that Trump is a downward jag in an ongoing story, not the end of it. But I still struggle with despair—Trump alone I could handle (Bush was no prize) but the delusional electorate that allowed itself to be so easily manipulated by hate-sponsored interests—that is a monster that banishes both sleep and hope. Meanwhile, the actual work of government lies gathering dust in some forgotten closet.
Over the past year or more I’ve been in a fruitless search for the perfect word or phrase, le mot juste, that would encapsulate the cesspool of objectionable characteristics that is Trump—but I have failed completely. He is disgusting in so many facets that even a paragraph can’t come close to cataloging the entirety of the reek off of him.
Briefly, I considered ‘Ape’, but I didn’t want to give him the honor of sharing what Abraham Lincoln’s critics called him—and besides, they called Lincoln as ugly as an ape—I would be using it, rather, to describe the character, the mental processes, of Trump. But even then, I would be doing a disservice to apes—who, if we can believe Jane Goodall, have far more humanity than the Trumps do. It is a shame though—his hair-color matches an orangutan’s so perfectly—but why should I hurt the orangutans’ feelings?
I liked Trumpster Fire—very witty, and damned close to perfect, since it suggests an entire dumpster full of various kinds of trash on fire. But still, it doesn’t capture the revulsion Trump inspires. Tiny-hands Trump is nice—because we must never forget that the most important response to Trump is laughter. Now that we know he is bereft of decency, we shouldn’t give him he satisfaction of knowing how horrified we are, whenever he speaks—we should stick to straight laughter—that’s what he started with, and he hasn’t done anything to change that.
Yeah, he won the Electoral College by negative-three-million—which is a lot of support—but you have to put that in perspective. We now have an opioid-addiction crisis in this country, with hundreds of thousands of addicts, and tens of thousands of deaths-by-overdose every year—making opioid-addiction our newest addition to the list of ‘leading causes of death’. So if you want to talk about the judgment of the American people, I think you’re in the wrong decade.
Drumpf is tempting—damn, that’s an ugly Old-Country original-family-name for the Trumps—but it’s a little too silly and playful, and I wouldn’t want anyone to think of Trump as some cute lil Napoleon—he’s a full-on Hitler wannabe and it would behoove all of us to never forget that fact. Pussy-Grabber used to be a front-runner, but now it just makes me sad, remembering that he said that, out loud, on every TV—and people still voted for the cretin—so now it sounds more like the death-knell of sanity—President Pussy-Grabber.
People have had this problem for centuries—someone is such a blot on society that everyday words won’t do—we try cretin, fathead, lamebrain, lightweight, loon, despoiler, hoodlum, looter, defacer, dirty, indictable, iniquitous, nefarious, hustler, culprit, bad actor, charlatan, con artist, crook, hypocrite, swindler, chiseler—there are so many words that might apply, but don’t encompass the full chamber-pot that is the prez-elect.
I think I need a meta-word. Or maybe I’m just rushing things. In the not-so-distant future there will be a perfect cliché for what I’m trying to say—and everyone will know what I mean, whenever I say: “Hey, don’t be so ‘trump’, man.”
Maybe you can help, kind reader—I need a word that suggests the malodorous rot at the center of a lost soul, the icy emptiness of an arctic waste, the chaos of a prison gang-rape, and the precious mincing of a self-loving, entitled brat. Please add your suggestions in the comments below:
Donald Trump says he’s ‘not surprised’ the Golden Globes trashed him. Well Donny, neither are any of us—you are trash. And if public-minded performers want to use their spotlight to criticize your lack of character, who can blame them?
But what does he mean he’s ‘not surprised’? Does he mean he saw it coming? Is he saying that it’s no surprise whole industries are against him, that large groups of intellectual and creative people will be trashing him for the next four years? That would make sense—he’s set himself up as the Anti-Intelligence, as his only route to a position where intellectual rigor has often been regarded as a plus. And by trashing thoughtfulness and education, he’s ‘taken sides’ against basically anyone in this country who’s ever read a book.
So no surprise—Trump knows his enemies—anyone creative, anyone educated, anyone with an ounce of decency or character—and it would only be surprising if such people failed to trash him for the next four years. He’s created a nation as ‘high-school hallway’, where the bullies rule and the teachers are nowhere to be seen. And like said bullies, he’s apt to make pompous pronouncements, like “I’m not surprised.” As if his lack of amazement takes anything away from the pounding Streep laid on his ass.
For many people, high school was the last time they got away with neglecting to read or study or be polite—perhaps that is what the Trump-voters were seeking—a return to the irresponsibility of youth. And like children, they look at our modern issues and decide whether to blame the ‘grown-ups’ or simply ignore what they say (the ‘grown-ups’ in this metaphor being engaged citizens who actually read newspapers). Trump makes the perfect head-bully in this ‘hallway’—because he encourages all the other kids to laugh at the teachers—that is to say, the journalists, the scientists, women, non-whites, non-Christians—and honest people.
Trump has no use for honesty—he proved to himself, with his campaign, that being honest is for losers. So I wouldn’t expect a single true word out of that sphincter in his face, even though lying-while-president is much more dangerous than lying to become president.
And when I say ‘dangerous’, I’m not talking about any risk for Trump—that’s the beauty of it, as far as he’s concerned. All the horrors he will bring to pass will stalk the majority of Americans—but none of it will ever touch him. It’s like with health care—the members of Congress get their premium health care for free—so they don’t care how god-awful (or simply non-existent) the healthcare for everyone else is.
Trump will cause loss and suffering for all Americans, ironically more for those who supported him than for anyone else, but he will skate off—still a dick, still rich, still an egomaniac. Even the next president will suffer (just as Obama did when Bush shit all over the carpet, on his way out the door) but Trump will just go on enjoying making his shit sandwiches, without ever having to eat one. I’m not surprised.
Well, it’s off to the races again for the Drumpf-Dupes. They’re scrambling mightily to ‘spin’ the Putin hacking scandal—desperate to deride proof that they were taken in, led like sheep to the slaughter.
I don’t know what these people are experiencing—what must they have gone through? To see the bloated scam-artist leering from his podium—and think to themselves—‘yes, there is our hero’. I don’t know—I don’t think even Putin can take credit for that level of brainwashing. I think he had help from the whores of media—and from that jackass Comey, at the FBI.
But mostly it was years of conditioning—and for that we can all blame the Republicans. Ever since they started a war by mistake and bankrupted the country, they have been on the wrong side, the inhumane side, the greedy side, the unscientific side—for so long that their entire approach is a matter of denying reality, of calling the night the day. They only stop lying long enough to call good, honest people liars—then they go back to lying.
It’s gone beyond dishonesty—the GOP are actively spreading mental illness—a fugue state in which decency is a mistake, insults are arguments, and a greedy, conceited, handsy pig is our new role model.
They’re still talking about their damn wall, when anyone with a brain in their head is long past exhausted with discussing how stupid an idea a wall is. They’re about to cancel health coverage—it’s so important to them that they haven’t had a moment to spare, to plan an alternative. And this is important—it doesn’t matter what happens to all of us afterwards—all that matters is that they cancel health coverage. This is the clarity of purpose of a two-year-old—no wonder they spent the last eight years having a temper tantrum.
The saddest part is that their constituents elected them to have a temper tantrum—they elected them on the understanding that they would not govern—that they would obstruct governance. What is the deal with these voters? The whole idea of democracy is the people change what they’re unsatisfied with—you don’t destroy the machinery of change. No, that’s something manipulative, wealthy pigs try to convince you to do, with their propaganda—you’re not supposed to fall for it, you idiots. And now they’ve got you actually defending Putin, so you don’t look like a gullible rube, taken all the way to the cleaners. Don’t look now, but it’s only going to get worse.
I’ve stolen today’s title from the New York Times headline—because in their piece, they’re discussing his rejection of intelligence-gathering agencies—but I think it is just as important to point out the truth of this headline in more general terms. Trump has an animal cunning, so it’s not that he’s casting his own intelligence aside—he’s plowing the intelligence of others aside as he sweeps the road clear for graft, corruption, and misconduct.
He started by belittling the experience and intelligence of his opponent—inveigling the voters to cast aside their own intelligence and good judgement, and vote as if they were watching the reality game show that gave Trump such prominence among the illiterate. Then he began belittling the importance of the truth—pretending, like a toddler, that saying “Is Not!” was sufficient response to charges that he is unfit to be trusted with responsibility.
Now, the New York Times has run op-eds that discuss the finer points of calling Trump a liar—claiming that it is unfair to accuse someone of lying, if that person is unaware of their own untruthfulness. Now, I’m sorry, but that’s bullshit—Trump has blatantly, grinningly presented us with lie after lie, as if daring someone to prove the truth while the airways remain crowded with fake news and bullshit artists like Kelly Conway. Pretending that he has said these lies often enough to start believing them himself—that’s giving him far more credit than he deserves.
If Trump is faced with the choice of convincing people by reason, and bamboozling them with lies, he obviously prefers the second method. Do you remember his shit-eating grin, while he declared, “Obama is the founder of ISIS”—were we not supposed to see his obvious enjoyment of trashing every decent thing in the course of his campaign? Is it because he’s not so good with reason? Is it because he actually enjoys telling lies? Who knows—and frankly, who cares?
Him and his lackeys have parsed the grammar, inverted the morality, questioned the reality, and mugged their way past the sincerity of all the decent people that oppose them. Trump calls people names—that’s his policy. Trump says the professionals don’t know anything and he knows it all—what an asshole!
What Trump, his coven, and the whole GOP, really, do NOT ever do—is offer solutions, alternatives, plans, or ideas. They are full-on negative—because negative has two advantages—it lets them attack their opponents, rather than debate them—and it allows them to do nothing at all—and pretend that that’s their job.
If the media were honest, they’d be pressing Trump hard about what he’s going to do—he still hasn’t said, in case anyone was wondering. The media should be saying, “Yes, yes—bitch, bitch, bitch—we get it—but what are you going to do?” Paul Ryan won’t say what he’s going to do, either—I don’t mean to imply that the fartbag-in-chief is the only scum coating the halls of the Capitol. Their latest plan is to repeal Obamacare, but have cancellation take effect in four years—taking credit for a victory, without the need to solve the problem—these are the kinds of assholes you voted for—you have no one to blame but yourselves.
Imagine if someone turned seventy years old—never had a thought for public service his whole entitled, spoiled life—and decides he wants to be President. Yes, delusional is the correct term for that. What the word is for those who voted for him—I don’t know. Super-delusional? Yes, Trump casts intelligence aside, alright—but he sure has lots of company.
I’ve witnessed the entire cycle. Back in the hippie days, no one ever shut up about ‘issues’ and ‘injustices’. Then there came a time when people got tired of the constant ferment of social friction—they started thinking that they were too busy getting through their lives to ‘blue-sky’ about civil rights and social justice all day. After the Yuppies, there came the Moderates—basically our last three presidents’ terms.
But now the Foolishness, of which Bush-43’s worst faults were merely a foreshadowing, is upon us with a vengeance—and the funny thing about foolishness is that it’s all fun and games until people’s lives are at stake—and then, it’s just plain evil. Hitler was ridiculous, too—a laughably foolish prat—right up until Kristalnachte.
I’ve been civilized (for me) on social media—and I plan to continue being as civil as conditions allow. But I used to tell myself that the less attention I gave to the foolish people, the better for everybody. I would see stupid comments—transparently bigoted, sexist, xenophobic—whatever—or all at once, even—and I would scroll on by. I didn’t want to start nothing—and I knew from experience that the only thing greater than their ignorance is their close-minded-ness—which makes arguing with them a waste of time. Why should I start futile arguments with the brain-dead, especially on some friend’s Facebook post?
But that’s all over now. I still know that arguing with these redneck-nazi assholes is a waste of time—I still don’t want to cause trouble on a friend’s post. But I will not let a single one of these damn hate-bubbles get past again. If I see Stupid online, I’m calling it out—whenever and wherever. Unfriend me if you must—I won’t blame you—I plan to be as abusive as possible towards any and all stupidity and hatred I find online from now on.
If you have Kellyanne Conway’s School of Alternate Reality running inside your brain—then come get some. If you don’t like religion unless it’s your religion, come get some. If you voted for the city-slicker whites-only real estate mogul—come and fucking get some, you insult to the very idea of America.
Although President-elect Fuckface von Clownstick has won the election by negative-three-million votes, I continue to cherish these last days of Obama’s term. While the disgraceful pervert has yet to be inaugurated, America is still being led by a great man—a man everyone respects—and we can still take pride in our nation.
I know a lot of people want to go along and get along—but the chain is broken. ‘Coming together’ over the victor of any election always seemed inevitable before—but when the disreputable huckster who emerged victorious from this election is a lying, cheating, sexist, racist, ignorant puss-bag who more properly belongs in prison—well, then, ‘coming together’ would amount to divesting myself of any ethical decency, any humane empathy, and any knowledge of the difference between right and wrong.
I don’t plan to break the law—or even disturb the peace—what would be the point? But don’t ask me to feel like a proud, patriotic American again until after that horrendous mess has been cleaned out of the Executive Mansion in 2020. Not that I expect voters to grow an ounce of brains by then—but the Trumpster-fire is special. We have to cede him that much—the GOP will never find anything as creepy, cold, and slimy as the Donald to run in 2020—such excrescence only comes once in a generation.
I shan’t escape him, however—I have no hope of that. The craven whores who run such things will be rolling out red carpets for this clown, letting his Electoral-college/Russian-meddling technical-win be a huge eraser for every ugly, stupid, dishonest, ignorant thing he’s done or said over this past year’s time. They’ll even pretend his history of real estate chicanery and bankruptcy never really happened either. They’ll give this jerk all the respect and dignified attention that people like Obama, Bush, and Clinton earned—just because he snaked his way, through an election-made-game-show, into the same office.
We’ve never had such a low, small, self-regarding pest get anywhere near the presidency before. An honest media would be harping upon the unique, end-of-an-era, end-of-a-dream aspect of his ‘coup’ over reason. But not these shills—they’ll just go on gassing the audience, pretending that Trump has the respectability one normally associates with a President of the United States.
I can avoid the news shows—and certainly the news channels—but there’s no getting around the late-night monologues and comedy stand-up that attends our every political hiccup nowadays—so I’m still going to have this jackass’s leer on my TV more often than I would wish. With any luck, he’ll be revealed as the laughingstock he is, as promptly as possible—and all the clodhoppers who thought they accomplished something by voting for him can crawl back in their holes.
To many people someone like me is going to seem like an alarmist, an inciter, a stirrer-up of trouble—trying to upset the boat when everything is mostly working out just fine. What’s so wrong (I imagine them asking) with the world today—especially with the United States—with the status quo? And truly I have no rebuttal to that—for many millions of people, life is better than it has ever been before, in the history of all mankind. The tremendous lace-work of global civilization, with its titanic industries and giant manufactories, with the endless cycle of tons of material—necessities and luxuries—that circle the globe by sea, by rail, by truck, and by air, the smooth operation of all the stores and shops, restaurants and theaters, schools and hospitals, universities and laboratories—our world is a marvel.
And if the United States of America isn’t the epicenter of that marvel, I don’t know where else it could be. Everything is state-of-the-art: communications, transportation, engineering, entertainment, agriculture, medicine—most of the modern world originated here, if not literally, then in spirit. And I wish us all the best—me, you, whoever—I hope the whole thing outlasts all the neglect and abuse heaped on it by we who have come to take it all for granted.
But, just as a person may be very good at securing a high post, yet have little ability to do the job once hired—it’s looking like the USA was well-equipped to invent the future, but has given no thought at all to maintaining all its healthy ambition, now that Babel has reached thunderbolt-calling altitude.
An older America, full of empty space and potential, loved rapid growth—we suffered boomtowns and cities choking on their own waste—conditions were such that a modern business or local government could never get away with the health risks, the dangers, and the unfairness inherent in an open town, with more traffic in change than in civilizing influences.
And the laws and ordinances that prohibit such chaos today were enacted only after the rush of development had settled and slowed to the point where people started to care about their homes and communities as much as whatever commerce was going on.
Plus, new business in the present would not be filling a void. Today’s new business is far more likely to impinge on some other business’s market. The kind of growth that made America a ‘big-shouldered’ country—that’s all over. And the cracks that allowed people to avoid being imprisoned by Capitalism have all been filled.
When the power of Capitalism was more potential than actual, the idea of ‘every man for himself’ made things as fair as such things can be. But now we have a mature Capitalism, fully formed and, more importantly, entirely owned already—by a surprisingly small group of people. They not only own all the old stuff—they are strategically poised to acquire any new stuff from the puny inventors or entrepreneurs that find new ways to break through the status quo.
But it is not simply a stranglehold on the common man or woman, whose chances of making it big from scratch are on par with winning the Lotto—it is a stranglehold on the culture. Our legislators and our courts spend virtually all their time and energy on serving the wealthy—good governance and justice have become antiques, found only rarely, in tiny, out-of-the-way places.
Our obsession with absolute property is itself a symptom of the stagnation and stultification of mature Capitalism—corporations own people’s likenesses, they own people’s silences—they even pay scientists to do research, insuring that, if they can’t own the truth, they can at least obscure it.
Capitalism, Progress, the American Dream—whatever you want to call it—its job is done. We don’t need to build empires anymore—they are built. We don’t need to access our natural resources anymore—they’ve been accessed. We don’t need to build a Republic anymore—it’s been given infrastructure, industry, wealth, and power—all its citizens can talk to each other, from any place at any time—we are the envy of the world.
Our biggest and only problem is recognizing that the ends our forebears worked towards have been reached—period—full stop. Our job is not to keep hammering our heads against the family wall—it is to take stock of what we have—of where we’ve arrived—and try to find some new way forward. Hopefully it will have something to do with taking responsibility for the deprived victims of our present system. Hopefully it will reverse our present system’s tendency to empower the entitled, elitist pigs, like our fresh-baked president-elect.
Congress voted to do something truly stupid the other day—then they changed their minds in the space of 24 hours, and decided not to do that particular stupid thing. I’m not sure which is worse: the poor judgement that first led to the initiative, or the mercurial, chicken-without-a-head nature of this totally corrupt majority in Congress.
But I do not call them corrupt because they were trying to disintegrate an ethics watchdog (created not so very long ago—because of all their corruption). I refer to the corruption of their wetware—the bad programming in their heads. These people get elected through gerrymandering legerdemain and mass media tap-dancing—they answer to sponsors, not to voters. They have no ethical motivation—and they have no need to make even a pretense of it.
They are misguided, thinking that to succeed in politics is to succeed in government. They are misguided, thinking that winning at Capitalism is winning at survival. But what misleads their thinking most often is this idea that having the world’s most powerful military gives us the most influence over the world.
The best idea is always what has the most influence on the world. Our nation’s preeminence can be directly traced back to the best ideas—even our vaunted military is the product of thinking, done in an open-minded society that valued creativity and vision—and many other freedoms.
Our penchant for ownership of creative and scientific efforts is the latest and most deadly infection of Capitalism—first created to protect inventors and artists, copyright and trademark laws now operate as a means for corporations to ‘own’ the efforts of its best and brightest employees, without any requirement to give them equal value in return. It also acts as a shield of legal secrecy about any shady dealings that can be labeled (however pretentiously) ‘proprietary knowledge’.
Monday, January 02, 2017 1:11 PM
The airwaves are supposed to be for the public good, but they have become ‘profit centers’ instead. We can weigh, one supposes, the value of all the people employed by the entertainment industry—who support their families through television, and through advertising—against the total lack of value, for the viewer, in any of the garbage that gets broadcast one way or another to the various screens that fill our lives.
The schools are supposed to be for the public good, but now they either snooker you out of your money with fake classes, a la Trump U., or they give you an ‘actual’ education by handing you over to the loansharks. The loansharks will be a bigger part of your future life than the education, in many cases—so now many people seriously consider whether they really want to bother ransoming their youth for the sake of a sheepskin, or whether they might be happier in a trade. That sort of attitude is bound to keep America at the forefront of innovation—he typed facetiously.
Government is, of course, supposed to be all about the public good, but its rules against bribery and corruption do nothing to protect our legislators from lobbyists whose sole task is to influence in favor of special interests. Add in all the nonsense about fund-raising and campaigning becoming the higher priority than the actual job one was elected to do—all bound up with the perceived primacy of media-spending over fitness for office—and you get the kind of ‘democracy’ that we find ourselves stuck with today.
Capitalism goes beyond money and transactions—even beyond a way of life—it is a way of distorting reality, to make nonsense seem oh-so-sensible. Our public forums, our educational system, and our government are all baldly under the sway of the wealthy—one would laugh at the notion of ‘self-government’ were it not for that terribly sour taste in the back of the mouth.
Our interdependence is intrinsic, it is undeniable. Competition is a nice way to introduce energy into our culture’s interdependence—but Capitalism puts the competition before the interdependence. Wealth is a club—and there is no law against beating people to death with it. As we have seen, there’s not even any law against demolishing our values with it. Money makes monsters of us all—clutching our own to ourselves, more worried for our own skins than whether anything has a right or a wrong to it.
People say money is the root of all evil—I disagree. Surely people found ways to mistreat each other before specie was invented. No, I think of money as more of an enabler of evil, an enzyme for cruelty, if you will. If there are thousands of laws protecting our grasp on our money—and no laws that insist that every person be sheltered and fed before sundown, every day—then we have some messed-up laws.
One very important thing to keep in mind during the next four years is that the damage has already been done—don’t dwell on the idiot entering the White House in January, don’t listen to his stupid tweets, don’t let the media create some sort of question in your mind of whether they have ‘important information’ for you to hear. They’ve got nothing but nervous nattering to offer—and you can know that without their input—nothing good or important is coming out of this debacle.
So have fun. Find things to do that satisfy you. There are just too many idiots out there who still believe they did the right thing by electing that jack-hole—and we just have to wait it out for the next few months, until everyone starts to find out what it’s really like to have a stooge in charge. Until then, don’t make yourself crazy.
I think of it as a vacation. I was very involved in the day-to-day back and forth of the election—one day I’d be sure that everyone could see the pig for what he is, and another day I’d be wondering how he could still be a contender—and wondering how everyone treated him like a respectable candidate, in spite of his constant assholery. Right up until the last minute, I was hoping that this country was still able to tell a pig in a poke.
Well, they weren’t able to. And one of the major factors was the nonsensical, brazenly profit-oriented media, pretending to journalism to sell their filthy ‘air-time’. What a bunch of whores. So—no more watching the news for me. No more worrying about what will happen in Washington—whatever it will be, it’s too late for me to change anything. And if the news ends up with lots to report, I’ll be damned if the media are getting this pair of eyeballs or set of ears for their unholy mix of BS and advertising.
In other words, by abandoning their good judgement so egregiously, the Trump-voters have created a span of time when men-of-good-will (and women of same) are better off ignoring current events for the foreseeable near-future . Time for us all to go back to the frivolity of youth—when we couldn’t care less about what was on the nightly news, because we were too busy enjoying ourselves. Vacation time. I’m really starting to enjoy it. And if horrors are waiting in the wings, worrying over things until the ax falls is a pure waste of time.
Enjoy the Executive Mansion, you cretinous lard-bucket—I’m gonna enjoy pretending there is no White House, unless and until we get a real mensch back in the building. Or until my neighbors start digging bomb shelters. Either way.
Here in the future, things are different. I was born in 1956, when the world was a far different place and people didn’t know half of what they now know—so trust me, this is the future. I can’t begin to list the things we have created, the powers we’ve gained, and the secrets we’ve unlocked from the mysterious universe since the year of my birth. In the course of my lifetime, we have reached a destination so far ahead of what 1956 portended that we refer to things with the ‘post-’ prefix.
When we say ‘post-modern’ we refer to our time as being so far past our expectations and imaginings that “The Jetsons”, once a symbol of futurity, has become a quaint icon of the past. Where technology and history once seemed to file along on a set path, we now see our culture virtually explode—and our entire past rendered moot—by the chaotic changes brought about by developments in AI, robotics, astronomy, genetics, and medicine.
Beliefs once valued enough to merit Crusades and Jihads have become side-issues, old toys we are too grown-up and busy to play with any more. The few benighted groups who can’t accept this find themselves desperately throwing bombs into marketplaces in a futile attempt to keep religion relevant. Meanwhile, reasonable people have all new gods and demons to fear—killer asteroids, AI singularities, global toxicity, climate change, habitat loss, ocean acidification, gene-mod blowback, and overpopulation.
Reasonable people have another, more difficult problem to deal with as well—unreasonable people. You see, with technology making us all more productive, more capable of things that once required vast multitudes—each man and woman becomes a power unto themselves. Our old world, that troubled idyll, got along fine with unreasonable people running all over the place—there was plenty of space and there was only so much damage they could do.
But if you put unreasonable people in the cockpit of an airliner, or in charge of an investment bank, or in the Oval Office—the results are terrifying and global. Our civilization has become too powerful to be trusted in the hands of a childish mind—and yet it is the most foolhardy among us who lust for power and riches. The intelligent people are busily making the world more convenient and accessible—and the stupid people are working overtime trying to take advantage of everyone else—it’s a poisonous combination.
As we observe the powerful within the beltway, and in the several state houses, we feel the futility of having rich people working on ‘protecting’ us from rich people—but I’m not sure we recognize the greater irony of having the most unwise among us ‘protecting’ us from common sense and kindness. When I see some of these people on C-SPAN, orating with the skills of a middle-schooler, saying things no high-school graduate could agree with—I am shocked that such buffoons can get themselves elected to public office—and saddened to realize that their constituencies find them acceptable.
What self-respecting person could publicly claim that our problems are caused by the old, the sick, the poor, the immigrant, the refugee—the most powerless and disenfranchised people on this earth? And who could be fool enough to believe that those in power do not bear any responsibility for the lives they control? In a previous century, humanity mourned the fading of religion, saying “God is dead.” Here in our time, we may mourn the fading of truth and admit, “Common Sense is dead.” That will be the legacy of our late election.
There are levels of civilization—there are communities that are more comfortable with brutality than others—and brutality can take many forms. When we look backwards in time, to an age when women were denied their full personhood under the law, we can appreciate the brutality of what was, to the people of that time (including the women), normal daily life. If we look at history we see civilizations that were comfortable with slavery, with debtors’ prisons, with stoning, with so-called honor-killing—and even war.
In many cases, we do not need to research the dim past to find these behaviors—they live among us still. Their very intransigence is often used as a rationalization by those who would suggest that society rules don’t apply uniformly—and may thus be ignored when inconvenient. However, here in the soft underbelly of 21st century, middle-income, suburban New York, we have reached a level of awareness that makes it possible to look at something as old and accepted as war—and say to ourselves that humanity is just a bunch of assholes fighting over thrones while the rest of us endure whatever madness and waste that leads to.
But lest you think I’m all het-up about the stupidity of war, settle back, bub. War is just the stupidest example. In every case of conflict or injustice, we can always see an easy solution—being generous. But this path is unfailingly left idle, while we wear grooves in all the very stupidest alternatives. Why? Well, because you can’t go feeding stray kittens—that’s why. If we’re too generous, we may end up with nothing left for ourselves!
And that is certainly a risk faced by overly-generous individuals. However, the global community could easily provide a comfortable life for every single soul on the planet—if it weren’t for one small detail: Modern civilization, as full of potential as it may be, is also predicated on greed and competition.
We search in vain for ways to make a competitive system a humanitarian system as well—we even run into bloated fat-cats who think universal healthcare is overly generous. Point one—if it weren’t for the selfless humanitarian pioneers in the field of medicine, there wouldn’t be these bloodless Big-Pharma and Insurancing entities, sucking their profits out of the veins of the sick and infirm. Point two—it is more efficient to provide universal public healthcare than it is to squeeze maximum profits from the solvent and let the poor slip between the cracks. While individual profit-centers may suffer, the overall public expense is less when using the charitable option.
And let’s face it—most people don’t want programs giving away free stuff to poor people, because they hate their damn jobs and they resent anyone who gets something out of it, besides themselves. They don’t stop to think that their stingy boss is getting most of the profit from their work—and the boss, besides getting out of working hard, even gets to boss them around. But sure, go ahead and resent poor people, if you think that’s your enemy. And don’t forget to kiss ass at work.
The truth is right in front of us—being generous is the best way to lower violence and suffering—and it is far more effective than coercion or scare-tactics, because once you have a community that feels secure and comfortable, you couldn’t break them out of their living rooms with dynamite. Jobs that pay a lot of money create people who spend a lot of money. Paying big bonuses to hot-shots in upper management doesn’t create any commerce—it depresses it by creating a huge group of non-consumers.
The concentration of wealth among 1% of the population creates the same kind of stagnation that keeping all your money in a safe creates—those bloated, confused billionaires don’t have the slightest fraction of the energy for commerce, for buying and selling, for growing and making, that the same money would find in the hands of large numbers of the working classes. Those billions of dollars might just as well not exist to begin with. And that is all beside the point of the unacceptable injustice of Post-Capitalism—where everyone works harder and harder, getting poorer and poorer—except for the greedy pigs and the corrupt legislators.
And that is my point today—we spend a great deal of time bewailing the horrendous injustices of our Capitalist paradigm (as well we should) but we should spare equal time for considering that this unfairness is not merely wrong and cruel—it is also stupid. It is idiotic to base our lives solely on competing for money—but if you ask any Trump voter, they will assure you that that’s the American way. And by Trump voter, I mean to suggest a stupid person.
We are about to get quite a show from the crowd of leeches that constitute the incoming administration—they’re going to slash and burn every vestige of liberalism they can find. The sad thing about these money-grubbing turds is that they will not be replacing anything they tear down—they will not add one note of grace or gleam of bounty to our lives—they may even destroy themselves as they tear at the delicate fabric of so many reasonable men’s and women’s efforts to form a better union. They offer nothing but spite and bile—and it is a great shame that we did not see them coming, before we were stuck with them.
Wednesday, April 12, 2017 3:17 PM
Mardi Gras, Pi Day, St Paddy’s, Easter… do you get the feeling that people are desperate for a party by the time winter finally starts to end? Yet here we sit, between two snowstorms—snowstorms that didn’t bother us all through January or February. But, hey—power’s back up, no harm, no foul—and who wants the year to go by without a little snow, anyway, right?
Trump supporters are too foolish to realize they’re being lied to. Trump himself is an ignoramus, a fool, and a crazy person—and not in a cute way, but as in a raving lunatic with a gun. The Republicans are hypocrites who, in their own quiet way, are just as toxic—more so, when we consider that Trump just flails about, while these jackasses are serious and considered about their demonic agenda. Lies are being told. Laws are being broken—or repealed, if they’re really good ones. Hate is being touted as national security. And the media is reporting on the tweets of a madman, just because he lives in the White House.
It should be no surprise that the era of Trump has brought back a resurgence of Flat-Earthers—in the quest for distraction and chaos, no idea is too ludicrous. (And if Trump didn’t generate three scandals per day, our gaze might linger on one of his fouler failings.) Believing that the Earth is flat is kind of like a religious thing—it didn’t exist for the ancient Greeks, who knew better, and it doesn’t exist today, among most developed nations’ peoples.
To many people someone like me is going to seem like an alarmist, an inciter, a stirrer-up of trouble—trying to upset the boat when everything is mostly working out just fine. What’s so wrong (I imagine them asking) with the world today—especially with the United States—with the status quo? And truly I have no rebuttal to that—for many millions of people, life is better than it has ever been before, in the history of all mankind. The tremendous lace-work of global civilization, with its titanic industries and giant manufactories, with the endless cycle of tons of material—necessities and luxuries—that circle the globe by sea, by rail, by truck, and by air, the smooth operation of all the stores and shops, restaurants and theaters, schools and hospitals, universities and laboratories—our world is a marvel.
