News flash

OBAMA WALKS ON WATER, RAISES DEAD

WASHINGTON, DC – Thousands of worshipful but not very surprised onlookers today observed President-elect Barack Obama walk across the surface of the Potomac River from the Lincoln Memorial to the Arlington National Cemetery, parallel to the south side of the Arlington Memorial Bridge. On the way, he was seen to cross two busy highways, the George Washington Memorial Parkway and the Jefferson Davis Highway, by simply holding up his hand, at which gesture all traffic came to a grinding halt. Once at the Arlington Cemetery, he proceeded to raise several dozen newly buried veterans from their graves.

Ecstatic crowds lined the route, chanting his name with the addition of “Our Savior” and frantically grabbing at him to touch the hem of his garment. The Secret Service were powerless to do anything to keep them back, but decided it would be unwise and impolitic to try anyway.

Commentators have suggested that, impressive as these acts are, it will take far greater miracles for him to rescue the American economy from its continuing plunge into catastrophic collapse.

Gloom and doom

In my usually cheerful, upbeat mood, I Googled on “Gloom and doom” and found a blog (dating all the way back to 1999) actually called “Gloom and doom report” (author unidentified), which I immediately bookmarked. Some good stuff, but some a little fringey (with an anti-Zionist tone which frankly appeals to me, but we won’t get into that). Why was I Googling on this? In order to find reinforcement from other people and sources for my cheerful, upbeat mood, of course, which has recently received a downward shove at precisely the time when everyone else seems to be floating on clouds of euphoria.

I thought I had posted, back in early '07, soon after the hollow “victory” of the Dummy-crats winning weak “control” of Congress, a gloom-and-doom prediction that it wouldn’t amount to anything because the Dummies wouldn’t have the guts or balls to do anything about it. The closest to this that I can find in my archives is “Have a nice day” (2 June 07), which mentioned Joe Bageant’s prediction: “Even before the entire Congress recently begged the Mad Emperor for the privilege of standing in line to suck his cock by writing him a blank fucking check for his evil war, Bageant was warning that any appearance of the ‘liberals’ attaining victory because of pissed-off conservatives leaving the ranks was an illusion.” My skepticism and cynicism at that time were driven, of course, by everyone else’s elation at the Dummy-cratic “victory,” and Bageant seemed to be the only one besides me who took a jaundiced view of it; and we turned out, tragically, to be right, and Pelosi turned out to be not Speaker of the House but Spineless Jellyfish of the House.

Well, you can probably figure out where this is heading. Once more I’m in the position of raining on everyone else’s parade. After all the dancing in the streets and slapping each other on the back, comes the hard work of making good on all the rosy promises. And how many of them can be made good on? We all know that all politicians promise you the moon and give you a lump of moldy cheese, and we can only hope that Obama will give us slightly more than moldy cheese, even though it’s a safe bet he won’t be able (and perhaps never intended) to give us everything he promised. As I wrote on 12 September (“Who cares? It’s all lies.”): “I don’t think [Obama] will be able to make any fundamental difference [i.e., in terms of keeping his promises] … because the plutocratic cabal will keep him from doing so and will impede and frustrate his every move in that direction.” On "Doug's dynamic drivel," I was linked to a YouTube of that obnoxious loser Nader being interviewed on Fucks News on election night, in which he showed himself to be more of an asshole than usual by suggesting that Obama might turn out to be an “Uncle Tom for the giant corporations.” His choice of language was, of course, repulsive even for rhetoric, right up there with some of the McCain/Palin attacks, but the point was not just a cheap shot. He then went on to itemize some of the things in Obama’s history which he thinks support the allegation: “voted for the Wall Street bailout, supports expanding military budget that is desired by the military-industrial complex, doesn’t really have a tax reform thing for the ordinary fellow in this country, opposes single-payer full Medicare for all because the giant HMOs do, doesn’t have a living wage [policy], . . .” Well, that’s a pretty damning list, and if it’s true and accurate, it does cast a bit of a pall over the rainbow. Will he really try to deliver on his promises and be impeded and frustrated by the plutocratic cabal, or did he never really intend to deliver on them because he’s already in cahoots with them?

On the other hand, I will grant that even as President-elect, this early in the game, he does seem to have taken some promising steps in the right direction. So I’ll try to muster up a slightly more positive and hopeful attitude. But it’ll be hard work, and not entirely sincere. Even in a best-case scenario for Big O’s presidency, there remains the impending and rapidly approaching global eco-catastrophe (if the unstoppable global economic meltdown doesn’t get us first), and more and more pundits are claiming that any attempts to reverse it or even slow it down appreciably by any sorts of energy conservation measures will be too little too late. The handwriting is on the wall; and in case you didn’t know what handwriting that aphorism refers to, the source is Daniel 5, in which, during a drunken feast by King Belshazzar of Babylon, a disembodied hand (“The beast with five fingers”) appears and writes on the wall of the palace a message which is translated by Daniel: “You have been weighed in the scales and found wanting; your days are numbered.” Or more colloquially, your ass is buttermilk, and there’s nothing you can do about it.

Happy Thanksgiving.

Time for a little levity

On the day when the fate of American civilization, if not of the whole world, hangs in the balance, I think we need a little humor. As usual, the path by which I came upon this little tidbit in Wikipedia is tortuous and unclear, but in the article on “Legends surrounding the papacy,” we learn that there was a legend that a woman, “Pope Joan,” had occupied that office in 855-858, that she became pregnant during her papacy, and that she gave birth after falling off a horse in public, whereupon she was stoned to death in the street by “the astonished crowd.” “As a consequence, popes throughout the medieval period were required to undergo a procedure wherein they sat on a special chair with a hole in the seat. A cardinal would have the task of putting his hand up the hole to check whether the pope had testicles.”

I wonder if Benny Sixteen (a.k.a. Ratman, a.k.a. “Eggs” Benedict) had to undergo this interesting examination. And who got picked to be the lucky cardinal? Was this chair like a toilet seat? Probably not; the hole was probably small enough so only his balls were accessible. If so, this eliminates the fascinating possibility of the cardinal getting his hand shat upon.

Welcome to the medieval Roman Church. I won’t even get into Pope John XII; look him up for yourselves. And you thought the modern Church was bad!

Cornered rats

I have often said that I find Joe Bageant’s blog depressing because of his merciless depiction of the decline of the West. Well, I can’t exactly say I find Muskrat Hunt depressing, mainly because it is somewhat lightened by Doogman’s acerbic and jaundiced sense of humor. But although not depressing, it is, underneath the humor, scary—and getting scarier by the day.

What scares me is the many links he posts to YouTube clips showing the disgusting depths of racist hatred being displayed at pro-McLame and/or anti-Obama rallies (e.g., “Very white kinda pride” 10/19; “This is un-American” 10/19 ; “These white people ARE trash” 10/15). But what really raised the terror alert to code red was “The cycle of violence” 10/21, which linked to a podcast on “Campaign for America’s Future” that featured someone discussing what she called “far-right eliminationist rhetoric,” which is a fancy way of referring to rabid wingnuts talking about killing us. To put it bluntly, if you think the far-right rhetoric is ugly now, wait until they feel really threatened by the resurgence of liberal activism and start violently acting out their rage and fear. Wild animals always fight most fiercely when they’re cornered, and the far-right is, quite correctly, beginning to feel cornered and very threatened, and they’re going to be acting it out in increasingly nasty, vicious ways. I’ve already mentioned (8 Sept “Who cares? It’s all lies.”) the possibility of Obama getting assassinated, and the meaner and scarier the racists get, the more imminent the threat becomes. He combines the vulnerability of Martin Luther King with that of John F. Kennedy, and no number of Secret Service men can ultimately protect him from another Lee Harvey Oswald in another school book depository, particularly if the agencies responsible for protecting him suddenly and mysteriously get negligent in doing their job. The racist thugs may be losing political power, but they still have influence and probably money, and money has its own power. And where money fails, sheer evil meanness can always accomplish a lot.

Perhaps the scariest thing about these maniacs, and one of the most difficult for us to comprehend, is that they are convinced they’re right and are thus impervious to any kind of argument or dissuasion. In fact, the attacks and criticisms they get from people for whom they have nothing but hatred and scorn simply convince them all the more firmly that they’re right. They believe firmly and unshakably, by upbringing and acculturation, that America is or should be a white Christian nation, and that they have a God-given duty to eliminate anyone who tries to make it otherwise. Atheists may blame this belief primarily on the perverted dens of iniquity which masquerade as Christian churches in Dixieland and its cultural extensions, and they doubtless do share a large part of the blame, but I suspect it has its followers among people who got it from elsewhere. This conviction is based on the simple fact that racism is not part of Christian belief in any of the mainstream churches outside the Deep South, and is in fact vigorously (but not vigorously enough) opposed and condemned by them. Racism has cultural and psychological roots much deeper than simple heretical belief.

Still ten days left for an October Surprise. Halloween would be a good time to scare the living shit out of the whole nation, woonit?

Preaching to the choir

On 28 September, Muskrat Hunt posted a notice of an anti-Palin rally in Boulder on Saturday 4 October. More out of curiosity and an excuse for a half-decent walk than out of any show of support, I thought I’d drop by to see what was happening. The post said the walk would begin at 9:00 “somewhere near 28th Street” but failed to specify 28th and what, so I just arbitrarily parked at the Millennium Harvest House motel south of Arapahoe. At 9:00 there was no sign of any demonstrators walking down 28th Street—nor of very many people walking at all, in a culture where most people go to heroic lengths to park as close as possible to the entrances of the businesses they patronize. Still no one at 9:15. I was mumbling cynically to myself about not expecting anything better in the People’s Republic of Boulder, when finally, at about 9:35, I saw some sign-carrying demonstrators straggling past Safeway. If I hadn’t stopped to take a shit at Dead Robin, I’d have missed it.

So, not wanting to waste the trip into Boulder and having nothing much better to do, I joined this rag-tag pack of about 25 to 30 adults and a few baby-strollers (and one dog other than Major), carrying home-made signs which were about equally anti-Palin and pro-Obama (the only one of which showing the slightest originality being one that said “Polar Bears for Obama”), as they strolled up the main north-south highway in the People’s Republic. Most of the drivers-by honked their support, of course, as one would naturally expect in the elitist yuppie ghetto of pseudo-liberals which constitutes Boulder. I’d almost have welcomed a few who threw empty beer cans at us or yelled “Love America or leave it, terrist assholes!” It would have at least been the beginning of some sort of dialogue.

The whole exercise was a classic example of preaching to the choir, and when I’d almost given up on it before 9:35, I was attributing the failure, not to the slightest shred of support for Palin, but to the general prevalence of my own attitude of “What’s the point? What would it accomplish?” If such an event had been staged in some place like Colorado Springs or Loveland, it might have served the purpose of making a few on the other side think twice about their loyalties, but in Boulder it was just another piece of narcissistic circle-jerking by said elitist yuppies and had absolutely no effect on the opinions or decisions of anyone in the other camp. Several times in my posts I have echoed Bageant’s contention that the liberals are going to go down in flames yet again unless they make some effort to reach across the gulf and try to communicate with the other side. However, I also admitted, in “Dialogue with raving lunatics” (17 September), that such an attempt might be doomed to failure by the intransigence of the “mouth-frothing psychopaths of the ultra-super-hyper-fringe-right.” But such a statement itself epitomizes the reason why such dialogue is nearly impossible. I’m the first to admit that I’d be the last to try to open up such dialogue, just as I’m among those who call the opponents insulting names. More and more commentators are observing that civil discourse has almost totally broken down in the political arena, replaced by increasingly polarizing, vituperative, and hysterical name-calling and demonizing. This is not the way to reach amicable resolutions of problems; this is the way wars start, and the present climate of political “debate” is approaching, or has long since reached, a state of verbal war.

Mark Udall’s opponent (whose name I don’t even know) in his (Udall’s) run for a Senate seat naturally attacks his record as a Representative, again for reasons I don’t know because I don’t watch any campaign commercials; and I think I’ve already stated that I don’t have a lot of use for Udall myself, for various reasons. However, just to see what the lesser of two evils has to say for himself, I opened his site (www.markudall.com, not surprisingly) and read the page on “Mark’s Established Bipartisan Record,” in which he boasts about his consistent efforts to “reach across the aisle” (a.k.a. the gulf) in order to accomplish things by consensus rather than by battle. Of course one could probably protest that many of the things he accomplished this way shouldn’t have been accomplished because they didn’t fit the more hard-line agendas of one leftist faction or another, but the fact remains, he deserves some credit for being among the few who try to bridge the gulf, in a climate where such moderation is railed against as a betrayal of “liberal principles” (whatever they are).

My niece in Longmont sent me a delightful satire of the yuppie elitism of liberals which I so scorn. (Also, obviously, a satire of the outcry against illegal Mexican immigrants). As I told her, liberals need to be told once in a while how ridiculous they can seem, particularly in the perception of rednecks. I’m not very clever at embedding links, so I’ll simply cut-and-paste it.

From the MANITOBA HERALD, Canada (a very underground paper):

The flood of American liberals sneaking across the border into Canada has intensified in the past week, sparking calls for increased patrols to stop the illegal immigration.

The possibility of a McCain/Palin victory is prompting the exodus among left-leaning citizens who fear they’ll soon be required to hunt, pray, and agree with Bill O’Reilly.

Canadian border farmers say it’s not uncommon to see dozens of sociology professors, animal rights activists, and Unitarians crossing their fields at night.

“I went out to milk the cows the other day, and there was a Hollywood producer huddled in the barn,” said Manitoba farmer Red Greenfield, whose acreage borders North Dakota.

The producer was cold, exhausted, and hungry. “He asked me if I could spare a latté and some free-range chicken. When I said I didn’t have any, he left. Didn’t even get a chance to show him my screenplay, eh?”

In an effort to stop the illegal aliens, Greenfield erected higher fences, but the liberals scaled them. So he tried installing speakers that blare Rush Limbaugh across the fields. “Not real effective,” he said. “The liberals still got through, and Rush annoyed the cows so much they wouldn’t give milk.”

Officials are particularly concerned about smugglers who meet liberals near the Canadian border, pack them into Volvo station wagons, drive them across the border, and leave them to fend for themselves.

“A lot of these people are not prepared for rugged conditions,” an Ontario border patrolman said. “I found one carload without a drop of drinking water. They did have a nice little Napa Valley cabernet, though.”

When liberals are caught, they’re sent back across the border, often wailing loudly that they fear retribution from conservatives. Rumors have been circulating about the McCain administration establishing re-education camps in which liberals will be forced to shoot wolves from airplanes, deny evolution, and act out drills preparing them for the Rapture.

In recent days, liberals have turned to sometimes ingenious ways of crossing the border. Some have taken to posing as senior citizens on bus trips to buy cheap Canadian prescription drugs. After catching a half-dozen young vegans disguised in powdered wigs, Canadian immigration authorities began stopping buses and quizzing the supposed senior-citizen passengers on Perry Como and Rosemary Clooney hits to prove they were alive in the '50s.

“If they can’t identify the accordion player on The Lawrence Welk Show, we get suspicious about their age,” an official said.

Canadian citizens have complained that the illegal immigrants are creating an organic-broccoli shortage and renting all the good Susan Sarandon movies.

“I feel sorry for American liberals, but the Canadian economy just can’t support them,” an Ottawa resident said. “How many art-history and English majors does one country need?”

Stop the planet and let me off

Anglophile that I am, there are times when I think the United Kingdom might be more bizarrely insane that the Divided States.

Browsing the BBC News a few days ago, I ran across the following headline: “Designer vagina trend ‘worrying.’ ” Yes, you read that right. (However, even if you understood it correctly, you may not have read it correctly. Remember that the Brits would read “designer” with the last syllable pronounced –ah, so as to rhyme designer with vagina.) Yes, increasing numbers of women in England are getting cosmetic vaginal surgery—for “aesthetic reasons.” This ranks up there with lunatics who put various pieces of metal in and through their penises. Do these nut-jobs really expect many people to care that much about how their genitals look? Are they going to exhibit themselves or something? Do they think it makes them more sexually attractive? Aren’t we all attracted to guys with rings stuck through their dickheads? Imagine these guys going through airport security. The metal detector goes off near the crotch, and the security scanner looks quizzically at the proudly mutilated traveler. . . . A recent search on types of genital mutilation (don’t ask why I was searching this) turned up some absolutely horrifying examples of what people do to themselves—or sometimes have done to them by others. Enough to keep one awake at night. . . .

Almost every day brings me fresh news to convince me that I don’t belong on this planet. I was left here by some alien civilization as a punishment for some horrible crime I must have committed on my home planet, but I can’t remember what crime or what planet—maybe one of the Galilean moons of Jupiter. (My astrological sign is ruled by Jupiter; isn’t that proof enough?) Earth is to alien intelligent creatures what Australia used to be to Earthlings: a sort of penal colony. The Weekly World News (my former alternative reality source—now defunct) had a headline years ago that said aliens think Earth is a bad neighborhood; to which one might respond that a lot of Earthlings do, too. Related to this is the belief that Earth is under a quarantine enforced by superiorly intelligent aliens who will never let us get out to go to any other planet until we clean up our act here, with the implicit and reasonable expectation that we may exterminate ourselves as a species first. e. e. cummings ended one of his most famous poems with the famous line: “listen: there’s a hell of a good universe next door; let’s go.” Count me in, edward. We can get through the alien blockade by telling them we’re aliens ourselves. Or the blockade may not apply to parallel universes because the lame-brains who’ve gotten us into this mess haven’t figured out how to travel between them. Sadly, neither have I, or I wouldn’t be here.

Dialogue with raving lunatics

In my last post on Muskrat Hunt (“The storm clouds gather,” 9/15), I ended by saying that we should be trying to reach out to the rednecks we’re ridiculing and insulting. Hunt-master Doogman replied that he wasn’t sure how to “reach out” to someone who thinks he should be exterminated, and I replied that I thought this was in many cases a defensive posture because they think that we think that they should be exterminated, and that if we took them seriously and assured them that we'd rather listen to them than exterminate them, they might lower their guns.

It turns out that this was the fatuous blithering of an aging peace-and-love-and-brotherhood hippie, and I got a good, hard slap in the face by the cold, skeletal hand of reality when I reviewed the piece on Bill Moyers’ Journal on 12 September (www.pbs.org/moyers/journal/09122008/watch.html), linked on Muskrat Hunt (13 September) as “Excellent Moyers piece on the eliminationist movement.” If I was scared earlier at the idea of McCain/Palin winning in November, I’m far more scared by the realization that many “shock jocks” (a term for the mouth-frothing psychopaths of the ultra-super-hyper-fringe-right who host talk-radio shows) are openly and deliberately inciting their tens of millions of listeners to murder and mayhem in order to promote Christian family values. This is literally true, not a hyperbolic exaggeration: Moyers plays quotes from Glenn Beck in which he admits he wants to kill Michael Moore (ending with the rhetorical question, “Is this wrong?”); from Michael Reagan (son of Ronald) in which he says he’ll pay for the bullets for anyone who wants to shoot 9/11 conspiracy theorists; and from Rush Lamebrain encouraging his rabid followers to deliberately foment riots (“Operation Chaos”) in Denver during the DNC. Clearly, it is as pointlessly futile to try to dialogue rationally with shrieking maniacs whose rage and hatred drive them to such insanity, as it is to try to do so with certifiable schizoids who wander down East Colfax yelling incoherent diatribes at the walls of buildings.

All this is, of course, protected by the First Amendment right of these cockroaches (to use one of their own terms for the people they attack) to free speech. There is the rule (which Moyers attributes to Supreme Court Justice Holmes) against falsely crying “theatre” in a crowded fire, but the shock jocks don’t seem to be bound by this rule. (On the other hand, when the fascist thug-pigs in St Paul brutally and savagely violated the First Amendment rights of journalists to free speech, and of protesters to free assembly, they had the approval and blessing of the Fascistican Party holding their convention there. There is such a thing as selective law enforcement; in fact, there’s really no other kind.) But perhaps even scarier than the fact that these satanic monsters can get away with this, is the fact that countless millions of their listeners let their beliefs and opinions be molded and influenced by them—the same people, doubtless, who think the LaHaye Left behind garbage is a true and accurate portrayal of what the Second Coming will be like and are eagerly looking forward to witnessing it. These are the people who are numerous enough and powerful enough to kick our ass in November, and if we can’t dialogue with them to try to change their “minds,” we have to outnumber them somehow—which is precisely the strategy which the Obama campaigners seem to be following: getting more backers of him from the undecided, rather than trying to convert the die-hard Fascisticans. Why is this coming from someone who said earlier that it didn’t make any real difference who won? Well, now that there’s a good chance that the heroes of the mindless, enraged, hateful rabble who adoringly listen to shock jocks may seize power, I’m beginning to think it may make a difference after all.

By the way: how can I get an audience of tens of millions? Or even just get listed on Rude Pundit’s links? I’ll bet it takes money, dunnit? Anyone have a couple thousand Benjamins they want to give me?

The storm clouds gather

I’m getting truly scared. I’m too old and poor to emigrate to Canada, but I’m terrified at the idea of having to continue living in this country after next January.

To begin with, let me emphasize that I pay little or no attention to the coverage of the campaign by the mainstream domestic media. I’ve been reading the coverage by BBC, and it’s blood-chilling. I’ve also been reading lots of liberal-progressive blogs (mostly Muskrat Hunt and The Rude Pundit). And what terrifies me is that, in spite of all the ridicule and invective piled on McCain and Palin by the left, and in spite of mounting news coverage that makes it clear that Palin is a total disaster and the Republicans should be floundering helplessly in their death throes, some of the polls which BBC tracks (based, of course, on American pollsters) show that McCain-Palin are either neck-in-neck with Obama-Biden or edging past them. One commentator says we have no one but ourselves to blame for showing so poorly because the Democrats are not doing what he thinks they should be doing to look better. It’s useless to point fingers, but obviously we’re doing something wrong, and somebody had better figure out what it is and correct it really fast. And posting attacks on Palin in leftist blogs isn’t going to do it. We’re talking to ourselves instead of to the people whose opinions we should be trying to change. The left is often accused of being narcissistic as well as elitist—just the kind of people the gun-toting, Bible-thumping rednecks loathe. They may be inarticulate and ignorant, but they’re powerful, and we’re stupid to ridicule and insult them instead of trying to reach out to them. Our ridicule and insults just more firmly convince them that they’re right.

Granted, a lot can happen in seven weeks. The trouble is, it seems to me, as a confirmed pessimist, that most of it will be bad.

Who cares? It's all lies.

I don’t know why I care as much as I seem to about this sodding campaign—care enough, at least, to express my opinions about it. I entirely agree with Bageant that it really doesn’t matter which branch of the Republicrat Party occupies the throne. Business will proceed as usual regardless of which one it is because business will continue to be run as usual behind the scenes (and more and more these days right out in plain view) by the corporate masters who own the government. They may not be in total control of the government on social issues, such as gender issues, abortion, and immigration, but they’re in total control of anything that involves money, and nowadays there aren’t many issues that don’t involve money. Health care? Controlled by Big Drugs and the insurance racket. Fuel costs, energy conservation, and renewable sources? Controlled by Big Fossil Fuels. The Iraq/Afghanistan war (or any other war, for that matter)? Controlled by the Military-Industrial Complex. Education? Controlled to a surprising extent by publishers of schoolbooks. Employment and the economy in general? Controlled by the whole vicious cabal, which is supposedly legitimized by the priesthood of economists, who practice the most lame-brained hodgepodge of meaningless mumbo-jumbo, psychotic fantasies, and muddled and illogical bullshit ever to be called a “science.” All of it controlled by the plutocrats who pull the strings of the puppets they prop up as a façade. So, all this inspiring blather about “change” is so much farting in the wind, and the people who are indulging in it probably know it. McLame certainly knows it, and is cynical and mendacious in even talking about it. Obama probably knows it but may be naïve enough to think he can change the system; I can hardly accuse him of being cynical and mendacious. On the other hand, I hate to think he’s that naïve. Take your pick. His alleged inexperience, which his opponents use as a cudgel, hatchet, and blunderbuss against him, is, in my opinion, one of his greatest virtues, even though it may the reason for his naiveté. “Experience” basically means experience in working with the plutocrats, which invariably makes one cynical and corrupt. McLame, of course, has lots of experience and a “track record.” Boy, does he ever! Don’t look too closely at his experience unless you have a barf-bucket close at hand.

So, who cares who wins? What real, fundamental difference will it make? I hate to say it, but I don’t think even the Great Brown Hope will be able to make any, not because of his inexperience but because the plutocratic cabal will keep him from doing so and will impede and frustrate his every move in that direction; and if he gets uppity, they’ll disembowel him and eat his entrails while he’s still alive, like African jackals do with their prey. (And then there’s always the threat of assassination.) So, when I call those who promulgate the rhetoric of change mendacious, that’s just a euphemism for lying. They’re all lying liars, to quote Al Franken. Obama may be more or less sincere, out of naiveté, when he talks about what he intends or hopes to do, but when it comes to the Republican attacks on him, and their defense of their own records and agendas, the air becomes heavy with the smell of shit. Muskrat Hunt has at least two posts in which major news media frankly and repeatedly use the terms lies and lying (MSNBC’s “Countdown” in “Debunking McCain” and “Talking Points Memo” [focusing specifically on Palin] in “McCain/Palin = Bush/Cheney”). If the Elephants suffered the Pinocchio syndrome, they couldn’t move without stabbing each other with their noses. And a note of farce enters the comedy when the opponents accuse each other of lying about their lies: “You’re a liar when you call me a liar!” “You’re a liar when you deny lying!” And since I don’t believe anything any of them say, I refuse to listen to them. When their propaganda pops up on the cyclopean mind-controller, I change the channel; and when every channel is broadcasting their lies at the same time, I just switch it off.

The one exception, ironically, is the TV ad for Marilyn Musgrave. Precisely because she’s the target of Muskrat Hunt, I couldn’t help being curious about what the object of so much invective could have to say in her defense. It’s a real tearjerker. “Secondhand clothes, and meals from a Salvation Army. A childhood devastated by a father’s alcoholism. Marilyn Musgrave knows about hard times, because she’s lived them. [All this voiced over pictures of sad, crying children.] Today, you’ll find Marilyn helping the homeless [footage of her doing housing construction], the hungry [footage of her working in a soup kitchen], the broken and battered [footage of her counseling a woman in what may be a safe house]. In Congress, Marilyn stands for what’s right [—for the rich and powerful], working with Democrats and Republicans to oppose the President’s cuts to Medicare and veterans.” I don’t know enough about her record to know how much of this is lies, but my guess would be, most of it; and the inspirational footage is obviously posed for the occasion. But remember, the Russians thought Stalin was their savior because he controlled the image of himself portrayed by the media. They can all be assumed to be lying. Always.

Whither will they Rove?

I think we should be very worried about the report that Karl Rove seems to have taken control of McLame’s campaign. This monster was the architect of some the most viciously evil schemes of the Bush empire before he deserted what he doubtless realized was (because of him, of course) a sinking ship, and he seems to have an uncanny knack for convincing people that Hitler was just a kindly little Sunday school teacher and Stalin was a sadly misunderstood industrial visionary. This guy could sell cyanide to Hostess Cakes, the makers of Twinkies, as a new baking ingredient, and rumor has it that he may have had a hand in picking the Alaskan Beauty Queen as McLame’s staggering mate. If so, it may not be as moronically self-destructive as we think and hope, but may be part of another Rove-ian plot which will work precisely because it appears so stupid. His Machiavellian machinations are going to add a new factor to the equation, which may shift, and seems already to be shifting, the balance of opinion. We were scared of this creature when he was in center stage, and we should be even more scared of him now that he’s behind the scenes. Pure evil once again slithers through the sewers of Republican power.

Different realities

The Republican Convention has made me uncharacteristically loquacious—far more so than the Democrat one. This message is only a day after my last one—unheard of for me.

The more I learn about Sarah Palin (much of it from Muskrat Hunt), the scarier she sounds. In the last post, I described the Republican ideology as meaning “little except anti-gay and anti-abortion, … and maybe pro-guns and pro-death penalty.” Of course, that doesn’t quite do it “justice”: anti-evolution, anti-global warming, pro-Christo-fascism, and pro-oil are also important planks, and on every one of these (again with the possible uncertainty of Christo-fascism), the queen bitch of the Republican Party stands firm. But her personal and political history is sufficiently bizarre and unsavory to make even some Republicans a little leery of her in spite of her ideological purity. So, given her appearance as a total, unmitigated disaster as a candidate, her selection has made many liberals perceive her choice as a form of deliberate mass suicide for the Republicans, a sort of Jonestown Kool-aid Party. And yet there are some Republicans who seem to think her choice is a brilliantly clever move which will save and energize the Party and lead their way to victory. How can they entertain such radically different ideas?

Driving home last night (Tuesday), I heard on the car radio a little bit of one of the speeches at St Paul; I never did find out, or much care, who the speaker was. I could only listen to about three minutes of it before switching to jazz, since it would have been rather embarrassing to puke into my lap in the car seat. But three minutes was enough to give me, as one who generally refuses resolutely to read or listen to any of the moronic garbage spouted by the Republicans, a new insight into the mentality of these creatures. In that short time span, it became clear that this person, who is presumably representative of the Party as a whole, was coming from what I would call (as in the above title) a different reality. He had (and they have) a totally different perception of the meanings of historical events and people. He spoke (and they speak) a different language—not totally different because they use the same words we do, but they use them, again, with totally different meanings. This naturally makes communication with them practically impossible, since neither of us can really understand what the other is saying; our ideas sound as much like insane gibberish to them as theirs sound to us. It is not entirely out of levity that I routinely refer to our nation as the Divided States. We are truly, and I fear irreconcilably, divided by barriers of language and perception which form, I insist, separate realities. I say irreconcilably because it seems that large proportions of those on both sides (including me on our side) seem so adamantly convinced that their perceptions and their use of language are the only “real” ones, and that those on the other side are not just opposed but to some degree clinically insane and arguably evil, that it makes any bridging of the chasm well nigh insuperable.

So it is from this unbridgeable chasm between different realities that the Republicans can view their choice of Palin for running mate as brilliantly clever and the salvation of the Party. (Even the term “running mate” takes on different connotations as to whom or what they are running from.) It doesn’t make it any easier to listen to them, but it makes it a little easier to understand “where they’re coming from” if I do listen.

Of computers and politics

Two totally unrelated observations:

1. It recently occurred to me that I never use my “personal computer” for computing. Does anyone else? I use it for word-processing, music-processing, and Internet access, but the closest thing to computing I do on it is to add up columns of financial figures, which has about as much to do with math as a grocery list has to with writing, or “Mary had a little lamb” with music. Very little of my Internet use is for porn, but a friend of mine recently admitted that he got rid of his PC because he realized he was masturbating to Internet porn up to three or four times a day and it was beginning to affect his life (not to mention his penis), although he credits his good prostate health to this. The bit about the use of computers was brought to my attention by a book I’m reading on the history of astrophysics, which pointed out that every advance made in that field during the 50s through the 80s was made by advances in the computers which were necessary to make the fiendishly complicated and tedious computations which are called for in that work. Those were the days when computers were used for computing. Among the personal effects I inherited from my father, who studied chemical engineering at Case Institute of Technology, Cleveland, in the 20s, were a slide rule and a mechanical drawing set—old-fashioned heirlooms now, to say the least.

2. I may be accused of cynicism (how could anyone possibly harbor such a thought!?!) when I note the strangely muted reaction of the Republican Party to the news, broken during their convention, that the teenage daughter of the Republican nominee for Veep was knocked up “out of wedlock,” to use a quaint expression. (Why does wedlock sound so much like padlock? Even a little like hammerlock.) This is happening in the so-called “family values” party which usually considers unwed teenage mothers to be crack whores on welfare, probably knocked up by Democrats and liberals, and is being adroitly swept under the rug, although everyone knows perfectly well that if this had happened in the Democrat Party, the Republicans would be making hay of it. As it is, the Rude Pundit is predictably and characteristically making hay of Sarah Palin’s nomination, referring to the “repulsive cynicism of the selection of the obviously insane, stupid, and corrupt … Palin,” although Rude could make hay of someone picking his nose in public. I don’t know about “insane, stupid, and corrupt,” but it’s pretty clear to me that the woman has absolutely no qualifications for the office except that she’s a “social conservative” (duh!), which in the Republican Party now means little except anti-gay and anti-abortion (that’s their idea of “family values”), and maybe pro-guns and pro-death penalty. I haven’t heard whether she’s a born-again fundamentalist Christo-fascist, but that can safely be assumed without being stated. There’s something oddly fitting about the coupling of this politically correct nonentity with a doddering old carbon copy of the half-witted psychopath who has trashed and raped this poor nation for eight years. For the life of me, I cannot understand how anyone of normal intelligence could possibly vote for that pair. The answer, of course, is that there are millions of voters out there who don’t have normal intelligence.

Death of a liberal

My last post was a more than usually misanthropic snarl-rant which in retrospect might deserve a little explanation. I have long and rather proudly borne the banner of a curmudgeon and have even compiled a list of 102 pages of “Curmudgeon quotes,” most of it a meta-compilation of other lists compiled and published in The funny times by Jon Winokur. A curmudgeon is generally defined as a bad-tempered, stubborn, cantankerous, usually old person, and, although rarely mentioned in the definition, one often sharply critical of humanity. It is, of course, possible to be critical of humanity without hating it, but I’m afraid I’m increasingly tending toward the latter. I’ve gone downhill from the famous line of Lucy in “Peanuts”, “I love humanity, I just can’t stand people”; nowadays I can’t stand either one. Hence my statement in the last post that I no longer give a cent to any of the social welfare agencies I used to support philanthrop-ically. I’m no longer trying to make the world a better place; I’m getting more enjoyment out of watching it collapse in anarchy, chaos, and eco-catastrophe.

Now that we’re in the terminal spasms of that quadrennial zoo-circus we call, usually without the slightest trace of irony or sarcasm, “democratic elections” (one of the major spectacles of which will be staged in Denver this week; I can hardly wait to miss it), perhaps it might be useful to discuss what the above “death of a liberal” means. At first it meant the death of a member of the Dummycratic Party, which used to be considered liberal and is now nothing more than the center-right branch of the Republicrat-Demoblican Party. I deserted the Dummycratic Party (or officially recognized its desertion of me) back in 1997, after that treacherous scumbag Clinton (think of NAFTA and “don’t ask, don’t tell,” just for starters) won his second term. So, if one gives up on both of the two “mainstream” parties, what alternatives are left, in terms of so-called “third parties”? I blush to admit that in 1997 I changed my affiliation to Green. It sounded good at the time because I was just faintly more idealistic and naïve then. But after they ran that equally idealistic and totally unelectable clown Nader, who arguably made it easier for the Mad Emperor to steal the throne in 2000, I got fed up with them as well. So, what are the other alternatives? Libertarian? Not bloody likely. They’re in favor of minimally regulated laissez-faire economics, and I think all Big Bidness, particularly multinational corpse-orations, should be not only regulated, but chained, muzzled, and castrated. Socialist? That’s not even a viable party in the Divided States, and while I’m all in favor of the state taking care of such things as health care and retirement and unemployment compensation and social welfare generally, I’m also acutely aware of the hopeless incompetence of government bureaucracies to do anything right, and the danger of Government-as-Nanny deciding it has the right to interfere in everyone’s private lives and tell them how they should behave. All in all, the political landscape in the Divided States is a desert.

So my official death as a political liberal qua Democrat dates back to 1997, but my death as a cultural liberal is more recent. I share with my mentor Joe Bageant a withering scorn for all politics, politicians, and political processes in the D.S., but my death as a political liberal considerably pre-dated my acquaintance with his work. (Perhaps our scorn is more withering toward the Dummycrats because we feel so betrayed by them. More traitors in my history: In 1992 I voted for Ben Nighthorse Campbell as a Democratic Senator for Colorado, and in 1995 the asshole converted to the Republican Party. And more recently, even Mark Udall has turned out to be a gutless eunuch as a Democratic Representative for my district.) But I’ve also more recently joined in Bageant’s contempt for what might be loosely called the liberal life-style. Although philosophical liberalism—progressive ideals of reform and personal freedom and social tolerance and all that—still sounds good in theory, I’m getting increasingly disgusted with the kind of people who espouse it. Once again I’m indebted to Bageant, who has frequently railed against liberals as a social class, pointing out that the party which historically supported and represented the working poor now either totally disregards them or regards them with a sort of elitist disdain, and doesn’t even try to communicate with them about their needs and concerns. Even the Great Brown Hope of the Dummycrats committed the incredibly stupid faux pas of denigrating (pardon the pun) the fondness of the working poor for “God and guns,” two of the solidest pillars of redneck identity; I’m not sure he’ll ever recover from the damage he did to himself with that one. And the “party” of latté-sipping, brie-eating, Porsche-driving elitists is notoriously fragmented by warring “single-issue” factions—feminists, environmentalists, abortion-rights zealots, LGBTs, blacks, etc. (note the absence of organized labor in that list)—who pursue their own agendas with monomaniacal and uncompromising obsession and make little or no effort to unite with each other to form a stronger party, or with the rest of the country to form a more perfect union. But none of that matters much anyway. Regardless of which puppets of which branch of the Republicrat-Demoblican Party get “elected,” they’re all controlled by the corporate masters who own the government; some of them just conceal their thralldom more cleverly behind pseudo-liberal rhetoric. We hoped for improvement in 2007 after the party affiliations of the puppets changed, and look what happened. Nothing is ever going to change except the façade, and behind the façade things are only going to get worse.

Nuke the savages

The other day I heard on the news that non-government aid workers in some godforsaken asshole of the world have been murdered by the natives—again. And again, and again. And it suddenly occurred to me that I hear an awful lot these days about non-government aid workers in some godforsaken asshole of the world being murdered by the natives. And the question occurs to me: why do the aid workers even bother with these barbaric fucking savages if they not only bite the hand that feeds them but hack it off with a machete? I’ve got a real simple solution for such barbarity. Any time these fucking animals murder the people trying to help them, nuke their fuckin’ asses. Don’t just withdraw your workers, blast their worthless hides off the face of the earth. They not only don’t deserve to be helped, they don’t deserve to live. I’m sick of this shit. I used to contribute fairly generously to social relief agencies that did a lot of work in these shit-holes, and this year I haven’t given any of them a fucking cent. What’s the point of helping these vermin to survive when there’s too goddamn many of them anyway? If they want to gratuitously slaughter each other, let ’em go at it, and sell them more arms to facilitate the job. And stop healing their disgusting diseases. There are good evolutionary reasons why they’re dying like flies, and we shouldn’t be interfering with nature’s work. And in case anyone thinks I’m being racist in relishing the deaths of all these non-Euro-American persons of color, let me add that I am eagerly looking forward to the day, which is rapidly approaching, when millions of greedy, arrogant, lard-assed, profligate mother-humpers in the Divided States are gonna be weeded out by natural processes—some of which, ironically, will have been brought about by economic processes. I used to wonder if I’d live to see the shit hit the fan, not particularly caring if I lived after it hit. Now the shit-house is falling apart so fast that I think I may really be here to enjoy the show.

I’ve been reading too much Joe Bageant here lately.

I stand corrected

I should always check Wikipedia before I say anything. Other people are not nearly as enamored of this online encyclopedia as I am, but I often think that 90 percent of what I've learned in the last two years has been learned through it.

In my last post, "Beer thumping with Heisenberg's ocelot," I said that It's a wonderful life has never, "to my knowledge," been recognized as a story about parallel universes (I'm becoming more careful to stipulate "to my knowledge" in making more and more statements, now that I'm beginning to realize how limited my knowledge is), and that I considered parallel universes to be very different from time travel. Upon looking up the Wikipedia article on "Parallel universe (fiction)," it turns out, not surprisingly, that I was wrong on both counts. Wonderful life is indeed mentioned under the heading of "Movies," although the writer claims that "strictly speaking, the universes aren't parallel in that they cannot co-exist; rather they oscillate between one or the other"--a rather picky distinction, in my opinion. The article also includes a large section on "Time travel and alternate history," calling it "the most common use of parallel universes in science fiction." I'm glad careful readers of my fabulously popular and articulately intellectual blog don't point out more of my stupid errors; I might become discouraged from continuing to use it to bolster my fragile ego.

What is surprising is that Wilson's Schrödinger's cat trilogy, about which I was writing as a story of parallel universes, is not mentioned in the Wikipedia article, even though the article devoted to the work itself describes the component books as "each taking place in a series of separate and slightly distinct universes." C. S. Lewis's Chronicles of Narnia is mentioned constantly (as by rights it should be), but Wilson's trilogy never once. Nor is it listed in Wiki's "List of fiction employing parallel universes" (but then, neither are the Narnia chronicles). These are two of many examples of one writer of Wiki articles not knowing what is contained in other articles, which is a common criticism of Wikipedia. Rather interestingly, Wikipedia has a large article on "Criticism of Wikipedia," and after reading it, I'm wondering why I was ever stupid enough to read so much Wiki in the first place, let alone stupid enough to go around quoting it all the time. How many sites do you know that go to such extraordinary lengths to discuss what incompetent fuckwads they are? At the beginning of this post, I said I should always check Wikipedia before I say anything. Now I'm inclined to think I'll never refer to it again.

Incidentally, a Wiki search (well, so much for sticking to the last statement) of "Parallel universe" without "(fiction)" added gives a list of articles which includes not only the one referenced above, but one on the "Many-worlds interpretation" of quantum mechanics. Needless to say, this is far too technical for a dumb-ass like me (example sentence: "Many-worlds denies the objective reality of wave-function collapse, instead explaining the subjective appearance of wave-function collapse with the mechanism of quantum decoherence."), and has nothing to do with my post on Wilson anyway.

Beer thumping with Heisenberg’s ocelot

Gosh all hemlock, three months since my last post! Kind of ran out of steam there. To begin with, scratch Time flies like an arrow; it aborted after only two chapters. No great loss. But how to explain the long silence? No explanation; no excuse. Blame it on entropy. It has nothing to do with entropy, of course, but I used to be obsessed with the idea that entropy was the explanation for almost all shit that happened. Second Law and all that.

I have several times referred to Joe Bageant, the passionately articulate socialist-redneck blogger whose social criticism I find so invigoratingly depressing. For quite a while his blog has consisted mostly of reader responses to his magnum opus, Deer hunting with Jesus (2007), and his counter-responses; in fact, the title of the book is also the name of the blog (although its address is simply www.joebageant.com). Most of the responses rave about how his book states with impassioned eloquence all the ideas the reader has had for years, and many readers from other countries (particularly Australia, for some reason) relate how the social decay which he describes in the Divided States also applies to their countries as well. But during all this time, well over a year, while I was reading what everyone else was saying after having read the book, I hadn’t read it myself. So a couple of months ago I corrected that deficiency and bought it (from Amazon; forgive me, for I have sinned).

Subtitled “Dispatches from America’s class war,” it is basically about life in what is usually called the working class, more or less synonymous with the lower class. Bageant himself grew up in Winchester, Virginia, which he uses as the paradigmatic example of lower-working-class America, and he frankly admits to having been raised a redneck. Somewhere along his journey, however, he picked up socialism as a political philosophy, thus making him that seeming oxymoron, a socialist redneck. (The journey incidentally included some time in Boulder with the likes of Timothy Leary.) Having achieved a modest degree of fame and fortune as an author, he came back to Winchester (which, like anyone’s home town, was no longer the town he grew up in), and the book consists mostly of the lives and experiences of his neighbors and fellow citizens, which are used to illustrate what he calls America’s class war. The various chapters are devoted to all the vulnerable and tempting targets of attack in American culture: shitty employment at the mercy (ha ha) of heartless corporations, corrupt mortgage rackets ripping off home-owners, the health-non-care racket designed to make the corporations rich at the sacrifice of the little guy. But there are also some scarily fascinating glimpses into cultural aspects slightly more indigenous to the redneck South, such as the gun culture which is such an important part of their social identity (hence the title), and the truly terrifying intersection of fundamentalist Christianity with fascist-theocratic “dominionist” politics. There’s also a chapter on Lynndie England, the soldier whose claim to fifteen minutes of fame was the picture of her leading Abu Ghraib prisoners around on a leash—just another innocent little lass raised in the white-trash culture of West Virginia just over the hill from Winchester, simply doing what any other good old red-blooded redneck would be glad to do.

More or less incidentally, he mentions here and there some of the many reasons working-poor rednecks have to hate yuppie liberals, and some of them are even reasons I hate yuppie liberals—and I’m closer to being a yuppie liberal than to being a working-poor redneck—an odd mixture which I believe some intellectuals call status-inconsistency. The main reason working-poor rednecks hate yuppie liberals is that the liberals not only don’t listen to the rednecks’ concerns or take them seriously, they try insofar as possible to ignore their existence. One of Bageant’s more amusing comments on the gulf between them is the observation that the supermarkets rednecks shop in don’t even have avocados or leeks.

A fundamental idea running through all this, without being the focus of any particular chapter, is the disadvantages the working poor suffer from shitty or no education. There are times when Bageant almost seems to imply that a lot of the problems would disappear, or at least be greatly ameliorated, by better education. But of course it has to be the right kind of education; the corrupt racket that public schooling has become, and its disastrous effects on kids (and the adults they grow into), are just more easy targets for attack. (How many people have pointed out the irony of the fact that the catastrophically moronic “No Child Left Behind” act was the brain-[sic?]-child of a president who was conspicuously left behind?) So all this is basically a rehash, from a refreshingly new and sometimes grimly humorous point of view, of all the social problems we’ve all been dismally aware of for years. Perhaps Bageant’s one truly original idea is what he calls the “American hologram.” As he himself describes it in one of his on-line essays: “Like a holographic simulation, each part [of American culture] refers exclusively back to the whole, and the whole refers exclusively back to the parts.” This may be a rather loose application of holography to social criticism, but it’s a novel statement of the way in which we are so enmeshed in the various aspects of the culture that it becomes very difficult to stand back from it or “outside” it and view it critically.

So, what does this have to do with “Heisenberg’s ocelot”? Well, the book I started reading after Deer hunting is Robert Anton Wilson’s Schrödinger’s cat trilogy. I’m a very slow reader, so it will take me a while to finish and digest this rather large book, but I might make some beginning observations. Just to lay some groundwork for those of my thousands of readers who may be unfamiliar with quantum mechanics: “Schrödinger’s cat” refers to a thought-experiment devised by Erwin Schrödinger in 1935 which illustrates the quantum paradox of a cat which can be considered simultaneously dead and alive until a quantum event (the decay of a radioactive atom) takes place to “collapse” its state one way or the other. That’s an exceedingly oversimplified and perhaps even erroneous description for the two or three of my readers who may be familiar with quantum mechanics, but let it serve my purposes. A rather far-fetched application of the idea of “wave function collapse” or “state vector collapse” can be used to postulate the existence of “parallel universes,” in the sense that each such collapse creates two separate and parallel universes, one for each of the states that results from the collapse. (Forgive me; I really don’t know what I’m blathering about, and the Wikipedia articles on the subject are far too long and technical for me to wade through. If one of my readers knows better, he’s welcome to correct me. “She”? How many female quantum physicists are there around? Several hundred?)

As an aside, I might note that the classic Frank Capra/Jimmie Stewart film It’s a wonderful life has never, to my knowledge, been recognized as a story about parallel universes. That aspect is, of course, disguised by the fact that the idea is never mentioned in the movie, since “Clarence” the “angel” is one of the silliest nitwits in film history, and even “George Bailey” falls somewhat short of a rocket scientist. In addition, the whole idea of parallel universes was either new or nonexistent at the time the movie was made, and even if it existed in theory, it was almost certainly unknown to Capra. And the story involves characters going back and forth between universes, which is so rare, even in science-fiction, that it almost falls outside the genre. (Again, I may stand corrected, but note that I consider it very different from time-travel.) Far more common is the story where the universes exist parallel to each other but never communicate with each other.

Thus, the three books of Wilson’s trilogy (each of which is labeled “Book One”) involve parallel universes in which people and events are similar but different. As an example, “Justin Case” in Book One is “an embittered, fortyish man who wrote beautifully meaningless film criticism”; in Book One he is “a mild, fortyish man who wrote excruciatingly intelligent music criticism”; and in Book One he is “a balding, nervous man who was living in a sociological treatise”—that is, he over-intellectualized in order to distance himself from people. Another example: Benny “Eggs” Benedict is a popular columnist for a New York newspaper in two of the books (different newspapers, different columns), but becomes Bonny Benedict (still a newspaper columnist) in the third one. Such examples could be multiplied, not only of parallel characters but of pun names—Bertha Van Ation, Natalie Drest, Juan Tootrego, Polly Esther Doubleknit, Carol Christmas, Marvin Gardens (a place on the Monopoly game board)—and references parallel to real people like James Joyce, and multi-layered puns like George Washington Carver Bridge (a historical person crossed with a bridge—itself a pun on “crossed”). The father of Markoff Chaney (a pun on “Markov chain,” a mathematical term) is Indole Chaney (a pun on a chemical structure).

Okay, enough multiplication of examples; you get the idea: Wilson loves word games, and so do I. Another of his more endearing traits is that he consistently refers to humans as domesticated primates, and to insects as the six-legged majority population. Lots of good ideas in this twisted view of “reality.” Maybe I’ll devote more space to it when I finish it.

Let me close with something totally unrelated to the above, but something I’d just like to rant briefly about. (Making up for lost time in terms of space here, aren’t we?) I seem to be hearing and seeing a lot these days about nasty people in history, most recently something on PBS last night about the twentieth century’s big nasties, Joe and Adolph, and their role in World War II. Well, I’m hardly the first person to point this out (I haven’t had an original idea in years), but it has often been noted that almost all of the really evil people in world history—the ones who are powerful enough to get into world history—were convinced at the time they were perpetrating their evil that what they were doing was for the good of their people. This would include not only Hitler and Stalin but also lesser ones like Idi Amin, Pol Pot, Mao Tse Tung, Slobodan Milošević (or, going back a bit, Bloody Mary Tudor of England, or all the Spanish Inquisitors)—some of these (and others who might be added) maybe arguably evil but certainly nasty—to a man, they were convinced that they were doing good, and the reason their morality is arguable is that a lot of other people (different numbers for different leaders) also thought they did good. (Notice that I did not add the Mad Emperor to that list. That’s a little ambivalent, isn’t it? He is certainly responsible for the collapse of American democracy, but so far he has not been directly responsible for the deaths of millions of his citizens—disregarding the Iraq war, that is.)

Anyway, the upshot of all this is to reinforce further the oft-quoted maxim of advice: Be very wary of anybody who tells you that what they are doing or trying to do is for your own good. This wariness can start with your parents if you’re a natural-born skeptic, but is easily extended, with a little experience, to teachers, priests, doctors, politicians, etc. To begin with, there’s always the question of how they think they know what’s good for you. Good for lots of other people, maybe (and often not even that), but not necessarily for you. Almost always, their ideas of what’s good for people are dictated by some kind of doctrine or ideology which ignores or denies human diversity: the same things have to be equally good for all people. Be particularly wary of anyone who makes such claims on the basis of being an “expert.” Most “experts” are moronic assholes with trumped up credentials. Heed the popular bumper sticker: “Question authority.” Anything worthwhile I’ve learned has been gleaned from bumper stickers.

Respect?

I think Colorado is probably a leading state in its use of what are sometimes called vanity plates, which include specialized plates and personalized plates. The high incidence is no surprise in the People’s Republic of Boulder, at least, where vanity characterizes the prevailing mood and lifestyle. Personalized plates say something about you personally (duh!), like your initials or something clever, like 2TH DR (“tooth doctor”) for a dentist, or RODEKIL for an asshole (that one lives a block away from me). Specialized plates advertise some special interest or organization with which the owner is associated, such as one of the universities or colleges in the state, or various military categories and honors, or organizations like the Elks Club or the Knights of Columbus, or numerous other categories.

But by far the most frequent one I see says RESPECT LIFE. I was surprised to learn, on researching this on the Colorado DMV page for license plates, that this is actually intended to memorialize “the victims and survivors of the 1999 shooting at Columbine High School” (the plate also includes a picture of the columbine, which happens to be Colorado’s state flower). This kind of takes the wind out of my diatribe, but I’ll indulge in it anyway. The basis for it is (or was) the assumption that most of the people displaying this plate were what is called “pro-life,” and I suspect that a significant proportion of those displaying it take the slogan in this sense rather than in reference to the Columbine shooting. This assumption seemed to be supported by a noticeably heavy presence of these plates in the parking lot of the Adventist hospital where I am perforce spending a lot of time here lately, as the “pro-life” ideology seems to be particularly associated with religion, and more particularly with right-wing fundamentalism or Roman Catholicism. And as used in this context, it usually means exclusively “anti-abortion,” which is a rather different matter than “pro-life.”

Now, I am no great fan of abortion; I accept it reluctantly only in cases of life-threatening emergencies. But the issue here is not abortion as such, but the use of the term “pro-life” to mean primarily, if not exclusively, “anti-abortion.” Those using it in this context are always referring to the life of what they sometimes call the “unborn child,” which to begin with is a contradiction in terms. If it’s unborn, it isn’t a child yet. A fetus is not a child. An embryo is not a child. (Okay, I may be splitting hairs on an arguable point, but humor me.) However, the term is used consistently by pro-lifers in talking about abortion because it’s emotionally loaded, and the people using it are appealing to emotionalism. More to the point, in focusing exclusively on the life of the fetus or embryo, they implicitly, if not explicitly, disregard any other sort or form of life, including that of the fetus after it is delivered. Are they in favor of free and readily accessible health care for the child after delivery? Not hardly. Do they care if the child whose life they have so zealously respected in utero is born into a totally unsuitable environment, enduring a miserable childhood, suffering from poverty, neglect, and abuse, and probably growing up to be a societal burden as a misfit or a criminal? Not likely. Do they respect the life of the mother? Maybe, but probably not as much as that of the fetus, and certainly not if her life is endangered by carrying the fetus to term and an abortion would save her life. Are they against the death penalty, a.k.a. state-sanctioned murder? Of course not. Are they against war, which is notably disrespectful of the lives of everyone involved, and of civilians who aren’t involved? That would be unpatriotic. Are they in favor of economic and environmental justice because injustice in these areas affects the quality of life of billions of people? I doubt it. Are they vegetarians? Probably not. In all these senses in which “pro-life” means far more than simply “anti-abortion,” they are considerably more tepid, if concerned at all, about any life but that of the “unborn child,” nor even about that after delivery. And they call that “respect for life.”

How about respect for intelligence? Can I customize a plate that says RESPECT INTELLIGENCE, with a picture of a brain instead of a columbine? Life can get along quite well enough on its own with little or no help from me; in fact, in view of the catastrophically exploding world population, it’s getting along all too well. But intelligence needs all the help it can get and suffers continual setbacks. As I suggested in an earlier post, the reason so many people voted a blithering, psychotic halfwit into the presidency (or came close enough to doing so to give him a chance to steal the election) is because so many of them are blithering halfwits themselves; they got what they deserved. But the people with intelligence didn’t; they deserved better. But they’re in a distinct minority, and we know what happens to minorities and their opinions in a “democracy.”

If I’ve been unfair to pro-lifers or inaccurate in portraying their attitudes, tough shit. All’s fair in polemics. I’ve always been bad at debating because I consider anyone who disagrees with me an idiot.

By the way, for the first two chapters of the greatest literary masterpiece of the last week, click on “View my complete profile,” and on the profile page, click on “Time flies like an arrow.” I’ve already bogged down after two chapters (only one of which is even vaguely narrative) because I haven’t decided yet what I want to write about. The Muses have already deserted me. Probably went to a museum.

The next great American novel

A couple of days ago, I ran across (again) a book called It was a dark and stormy night: The best (?) from the Bulwer-Lytton contest (Scott Rice, compiler, 1984), which is actually the first of five “dark and stormy” compilations, as the Bulwer-Lytton contest is held annually and thus continually creates new entries. The title, immortalized by Snoopy in the “Peanuts” comic strip, is the first line of Paul Clifford, one of the more than 150 books (most of them pot-boiler novels) written by Edward George Bulwer-Lytton (1803-1873), and is taken as exemplifying a particularly bad opening sentence for a book (to begin with, nights are dark by definition, so the word is redundant). The contestants are invited to “compose the opening sentence to the worst of all possible novels” (or the worst of all possible opening sentences). Hence, obviously, the question mark after “best” in the subtitle—i.e., the best of the worst.

The entries are, of course, parody, but the subject of bad writing is interesting in itself. Generally, there are two sorts of bad writing: that written by bad writers who think they’re writing well (among whom we assume Bulwer-Lytton himself falls), and that written, like the contest entries, by writers, arguably more or less good, who are deliberately trying to write badly. Moreover, the whole question of value judgments embroils one in the murky swamps of literary criticism and tastes, in which it is instructive to learn that B-L himself was very popular in his heyday and therefore evidently not then considered a bad writer, or at least not by the literary rabble who themselves had bad taste in reading. (See, the style is treacherously easy to fall into inadvertently if you’re not careful, which I almost never am.)

It is surprisingly difficult to write badly well; it takes a certain sort of good writer—a parodist, obviously, but good parody is itself surprisingly difficult. (Incidentally, my favorite “newspaper” is The Onion. For the cognoscenti, nuff said.) Parodic opening sentences may be one feat, but entire novels written in parody are quite another. A Google search shows that there are actually quite a number of them, parodying various genres of “serious” writing. Perhaps the easiest to parody is the romance novel, which for most people of any taste is almost a self-parody to begin with.

So, why am I mentioning all this? Because, as the preternaturally prescient of those among my readers have doubtless surmised by now (I love doing this), the next great American novel will be written by none other than le grande moi. And by what appellation will this monumental epic of love and adventure and silliness be identified? A search of the Library of Congress database reveals, to my astonished surprise, that they have no publication on file entitled Time flies like an arrow, fruit flies like a banana. How could such an obvious title have escaped exploitation for yea e’er so long? The line has been attributed originally to that great master of comedy, Groucho Marx, and has long been one of my favorites. Naturally it has nothing whatever to do with the subject of my masterpiece, whatever that may be. After all, to begin with, writers are supposed to write about what they know from experience, and I have had practically no experience in either love or adventure, though a great deal in silliness. But I should probably count myself among the first class of bad writers, i.e., those who think they’re writing well, and now I must try to carve my niche among the second class by writing badly deliberately rather than carelessly.

Ah, the throes of creative agony! Oh, the agony of creative throes!! Alas, the agonizing throe-ups of creativity!!! And what stunning cast of dramatis personae will populate this dazzling saga? Well, I’m thinking of people with names like Shirley Knott, Lance Boyle, a cook named Jasmine Rice (who, while working in the kitchen, sings things like “I lost my sugar in Salt Lake City, But my pepper grinder still does the doo-wah-ditty”), a priest named Benedict Q. Vainete, another religious named Gloria Pottrie, an unpleasant character named Dick Head—you get the drift. Talk about being done before. Robert Anton Wilson’s Schrödinger’s cat trilogy has Justin Case, Bertha van Ation, Juan Tootrego, Benny “Eggs” Benedict, Markoff Chaney (a pun on an obscure mathematical term), and Marvin Gardens (one of the spaces on the Monopoly game board). “Click and Clack,” the Car Talk guys, give “official staff” credits to literally hundreds of puns names (www.cartalk.com/content/about/credits/credits.html) which are doubtless copyrighted; I hope I’m not infringing on any of them, but I haven’t read through the whole list.

And when, you ask (indeed, you must be earnestly searching for an answer to the longing query), will the breathless throngs be blessed with the first of lo! many installments in this avidly anticipated tale of passion and action? Ah, the muses must whisper their inspired counsels into my shell-pink otic aperture, or implant them directly by telepathy into the convoluted mush of my prefrontal lobes, before first I lay finger upon my Macintosh keyboard to bring this soul-stirring saga to fruition. Short answer: probably a few weeks. I may, in fact, devote a separate blog to it. Not sure how to do that in Blogger. Watch for it.

It was a stark and dormant blight . . . It was a quark-informing flight . . .

Britney Spears and the downfall of America

I have often mentioned that Joe Bageant and his blog are among my favorite sources for depressing insights into the discouraging state of this once great nation as it plunges headlong into catastrophic collapse. Here lately he has filled in the spaces between his own thoughtful but rather long essays by printing letters from his correspondents and his replies to them, which often amount to mini-essays. And in a recent letter from “Robert (from) New Mexico” (which is the only identity he vouches to his correspondents), one line jumped out at me as a sort of crystalline summary of what I’ve been thinking for years: “Any system that encourages the participation of stupid people, is doomed to fail.” I think that encapsulates my attitude in a pithy (or pissy) apothegm.

I’m not sure why I’ve picked on Britney Spears as a symbol of this, except that Bageant himself has occasionally mentioned our national obsession with the pitiful shenanigans in the personal life of this half-witted loser; and just this morning, during the five minutes of mainstream-media newsertainment in which I sometimes indulge while eating breakfast (although I don’t know why it doesn’t take my appetite), sure enough, another item about America’s Favorite Vagina managed to crop up in that short time span. And one can hardly avoid the conviction that a nation which sits spellbound at the latest trivia about the life of some witless Barbie doll whose single claim to fame is her exposure of her snatch to cameras, is indeed stupid enough to be doomed to fail. (I’m not sure what conclusion can be drawn from this, but I’m convinced that if someone like Kevin Federline, a similarly hollow cultural nonentity, had exposed his cock to cameras, it would never have been shown the first time, far less become a national obsession viewed thousands of times. He’d simply have been arrested for indecent exposure and the case closed. There’s some sort of sex-discrimination at work here.)

However, one of the themes of Bageant’s criticism is that the nation is not really as stupid as the mainstream media treat it, a vaguely optimistic belief which he bases on the intelligence of his own readers. On the other hand, the number of people waking up and smelling the vomit, while probably growing, is still such an infinitesimally small proportion of the total populace that their increasing awareness can hardly be called a groundswell just yet. But if we grant, for the sake of argument, that the people are not really as stupid as the media treat them, then why do the media treat them that way? They claim that if it improves their viewer ratings, that must confirm their assumptions. But there is a darker possible explanation: they treat their viewers like imbeciles in order to make them imbeciles. The system doesn’t just encourage the participation of stupid people, it encourages them to be stupid; it creates stupid people! (It’s plain as a pikestaff that the system actively discourages the participation of the growing minority who are figuring things out.) And why would they do that? Because they don’t know that this dooms the system to failure? Or because they want the system to fail?

Which system are we talking about here? I think there are two, or at least two levels to the one system. The level I think “Robert” is talking about above, the one doomed to fail, is that on which the system of democratic government is supposed to represent and serve the needs of the people, regardless of how smart or stupid they may be assumed to be. The level which seems to be deliberately encouraging that level to fail is the level of corporate power barons who control every facet of society, and whose control is ensured by a populace who either don’t know what the power barons are doing (because they’ve been fed pictures of celebrity snatches rather than real news), or know and don’t care. Their abuse of control thrives at the expense of the people who have to be kept anesthetized to the fact that their lives are being sacrificed to the power structure. And as long as these deliberately created morons are participating in the system to the extent of legitimizing it—by such banal exercises in pointless futility as voting for which branch of the corporatist party will be propped up as a façade for the power barons for the next four years, and by feeding it with their lifeblood by consuming the tons of useless shit which become a major part of the anesthesia—then the system which should succeed is indeed doomed to fail, and the system which has doomed it will survive and continue to rape the people and the planet.

And we’ll all settle back and listen to another story about poor Britney’s poor kids. (And I’ll take some lessons in rhetoric and syntax—when pigs fly.)