Bah humbug again!

Time for another snarky, Grinchly diatribe against the commercial rape of the Feast of the Nativity of Jesus. Actually, I find that my last (and first) “Bah, humbug!” was three years ago (3 Dec 07). In fact, my illustrious blog, world-famous for its rapier wit and profound insights, has been practically dormant for the last year (one post in February and one in August), as it became evident that, world-famous as it was, nobody ever read it. But that’s another story.

Gosh, there’s so much to bitch and whine about! In ’07 it was about (1) the fact that it’s not Christmas until after the 25th, not before; (2) the mangling of Christmas carols blared from store speakers to make people spend more money; (3) the “war on Christmas” bullshit spouted by that demagogic asshole Bill O’Reilly. I could add “I’m dreaming of a black Kwanzaa” and “It’s the most horrible time of the year” to “Rudolph the purple-assed baboon,” “I saw Mommy blowing Santa Claus,” and “Roadkill roasting on an open fire.” I could note that the spending frenzy encouraged by the stores ultimately supports the economic growth of China and the stranglehold of the financial-services crime syndicate on consumers who are goaded into squandering money they don’t have and never will have. I could make more of an issue of obscenely opulent displays of decorations of such spectacular magnitude that they can be seen from outer space by the disrobed eyeball—displays which must create staggering amounts of greenhouse gases from the hundreds of kilowatt-hours of energy they use.

But this year I will attack Santa Claus—or, more precisely, what Santa Claus has been turned into by the secular-commercial society. Last year I was requested to act the part of Santa Claus in a fund-raising benefit at a local bookstore, and I replied that I’d only do it if I could call attention to the derivation of the present-day Santa Claus from St Nicholas, bishop of Myra (now part of Turkey) in the 4th century. Boy, did that ruffle some feathers among the secularists and atheists! (It didn’t help when a gay friend of mine asked to play the part of Mrs Claus.) Since St Nicholas’s feast day is 6 December, nineteen days before Christmas, it is rather curious how he became associated with the latter feast. According to the Wikipedia article on “Santa Claus,” he is derived from the Dutch figure of Sinterklaas, a “historical, legendary figure” who is said to bring gifts to the homes of good children on Christmas Eve. The legend has a hagiographic basis in the historical St Nicholas because of his generous giving of gifts. Nicholas is still revered as a saint in eastern Christendom, and up until recently was depicted in the regalia of an Orthodox bishop, which in western Christendom was gradually transmogrified into the ridiculous costume associated with Santa Claus today.

Enter Clement Clark Moore, the attributed author, in 1823, of that unspeakable abomination, “’Twas the night before Christmas,” for which I fervently hope he is eternally frying in Hell. It is to him that we owe this asinine business of flying reindeer pulling a sleigh through the sky and this fat fuck climbing up and down chimneys without getting a speck of soot on his absurd costume. I am warmly comforted by the fact that some children are terrified of this hideous apparition when they see him in stores during their parents’ spending orgy, and by the hundreds of jokes and cartoons which depict him as child-molesting old pervert who is often drunk when playing his part—as anyone would have to be to make such a monumental ass of himself in public. Then add that further atrocity Rudolph, who was introduced in a 1939 book before being enshrined in the 1949 song, and the debasement of Kiss-my-ass to a spectacular orgy of obscene prostitution is complete. Mind you, I’m not much more fond of some of the quasi-religious celebrations which focus on a sweet little Baby Jesus who looks distinctly Anglo-Scandinavian, and on immaculately groomed farm animals without a trace of cowshit anywhere in sight. (I still love the possibly apocryphal story of the choir that programmed a concert with “Here betwixt ass and oxen mild” followed by “Whence is this lovely fragrance?”) For my money, the best contemporary take on Christmas is still W. H. Auden’s For the time being, in which Joseph is the subject of town gossip because Mary is pregnant out of wedlock, and Herod is depicted as a liberal who resents being manipulated by God into being a bad guy against his will (i.e., slaughter of the Holy Innocents). I find it hard to beat these lines:

The garden is the only place there is, but you will not find it
Until you have looked for it everywhere and found nowhere that is not a desert;
The miracle is the only thing that happens, but to you it will not be apparent
Until all events have been studied and nothing happens that you cannot explain;
And life is the destiny you are bound to refuse until you have consented to die.

Try singing “Santa Claus is coming to town” after reading that.

Happy Feast of the Nativity of Jesus.

Periodical literature review

As usual, I see no reason to apologize for five months of silence. Nobody reads my rambling drivel anyway, so no amount of silence will even be noticed. Actually, I had in draft in April an article about my recent addiction to Facefuck, but I never got around to publishing it and have now deleted it. I see no reason to make any comments on the continued plunge of the nation and the world into apocalyptic chaos and anarchy, except to opine that it isn’t happening fast enough for my taste. I see no point in making more than passing mention of the BP oil disaster, or Mel Gibson’s self-destruction in a flaming display of terminal assholism, or the media debates over whether Sarah Moosehunter will run for President in 2012, or whatever other non-events are the current fodder for the mass-opiate machine, or what Joe Bageant calls the American holograph. I stay remarkably busy with music gigs of one sort or another, and stay autistically isolated from a reality which I find unpleasant and boring. Life goes on, in spite of every effort to avoid it. It is, as Thomas Hobbes said, solitary, poor, nasty, brutish, and short.

I remember when the mainstream propaganda made considerable hay of Moosehunter’s failure to respond appropriately to some interviewer’s question of what newspapers and magazines she read. Having less presence of mind than an ordinarily bright turnip, she made the mistake of trying to cover her ass, instead of simply quoting the great line from none other than Jefferson, one of our revered floundering fodders, who said that the man who reads nothing at all is better educated than the man who reads nothing but newspapers (but probably not better educated than the man who reads something besides newspapers). Presumably a candidate for high public office is expected to be conversant in the literature of the mainstream propaganda machine. I, however, not being a candidate for any office at all, rather pride myself on being essentially illiterate with regard to the mainstream media. If anyone were to have nothing better to do than ask me such a stupid question, I would reply that the only “news”-papers I read are the satirical Onion (stories you wish were true) and the local leftist Boulder Weekly, and the only magazines I make any effort to look at once in awhile are Mother Jones, The New Yorker, and the U.K.-published Economist. I may give a cursory glance at Time occasionally if there’s nothing else available, but I wouldn’t be caught dead with the Wall-eyed Journal. Mother Jones is to the Wall-eyed Journal as the Communist Manifesto is to Smith’s Wealth of nations.

But sometimes, in browsing through the magazine rack at my favorite coffee shop (which is NOT Starfucks!), I run across some rather interesting alternate realities, in some ways more bizarre than the Onion. The other day I picked up an issue of something called Real Simple, under the fatuous illusion that, judging from the name, it might have something to do with “simple living.” Not hardly. Roughly 200 of the 280 pages were devoted to advertisements, all of which, every one of which, were targeted to women, most of them for feminine health, beauty, and vanity. I subsequently learned from a Wikipedia stub that it is indeed a “women’s interest” magazine, to which I should have been clued in by the fact that the vast majority of customers at the coffee shop are women; I sometimes feel like I’m in a henhouse. There are no copies of Guns & Ammo, or even Sports Illustrated, in the magazine rack. Obviously no men except queers or transvestites are expected to look at it, and as one of the former, I can tell you the royal we were thoroughly disgusted. I can’t imagine how Time Inc., the publisher, came up with the name Real Simple, because the lifestyle it advertises is about as simple as the court of Louis XVI; I wonder if the millions of people on earth who live in grinding poverty, gnawing hunger, and squalid filth, or even the people in the “developed” nations who pursue authentically simple lifestyles, would consider it “simple.” I think Time Inc. should be sued for false labeling.

The real find, however—and, characteristically, I can’t remember where I found it—was a magazine called Kush: Colorado’s premier cannabis lifestyle magazine. Now, this is interesting on so many levels that it’s difficult to know where to begin. But let’s start with:
(1) The fact that a magazine devoted to “Colorado’s … cannabis lifestyle” is published in Calabasas CA, an exceedingly affluent, yuppie suburb west of LA, and there’s no indication that anyone on the editorial staff has anything to do with Colorado.
(2) The fact that the name “kush” refers to a strain of cannabis which is particularly popular with the medical pot community, and which is named for its origins in the Hindu Kush Mountains, in the region of Pakistan and Afghanistan—which will come as a great surprise to anyone who knows diddly-squat about the geopolitics of weed.
(3) The fact that the issue I picked up had an issue date of “June 15, 2010 – Volume 2, issue 6,” which may or may not indicate, depending upon what upscale publishers trying to sound like stoners mean by such terms as “volume” and “issue,” that the mag has been around for a year and a half, and I’m just now seeing it. I move in the wrong circles—obviously.
(4) Most basically, the fact that there even exists a magazine—a large, very glossy, rather pretentious magazine—devoted to “Colorado’s cannabis lifestyle”—or, more accurately, devoted to hundreds of ads for the doctors and dispensaries that the new industry has spawned. We’ve come a long way since the days when we had to furtively toke up in friends’ houses, paranoiacally looking over our shoulders for narcs lurking in the shadows; and frankly, I pine rather nostalgically for the good old days. (Who remembers the Fabulous Furry Freak Brothers?) Now you have to go to all the hassle of getting some charlatan quack doctor to write a phony prescription for you. And you can buy (or pick up free, as I did) your own glossy yuppie mag to show how hip you are in your use of something that thousands of people are spending their lives rotting in prison for because of possession of miniscule amounts. There are, of course, still many knuckle-dragging troglodytes, lots of them in positions of political or “law enforcement” power, who would like to continue locking people up for seeking relief from chronic pain. These miserable cretins, who are lamenting the passage of all the bills legalizing the use of cannabis as presaging the downfall of civilization, are still stuck in the 1938 mentality of that monumental piece of cinematic propaganda bullshit, Reefer madness. There’s a special place in Hell for these creatures.

Well, till next time, as Red Green says, keep your stick on the ice. (I don’t think he’s referring to a hockey stick.)

Brief political inquiry

Could someone please tell me why the Republicans are enjoying such a huge resurgence of popularity among the masses when they’re the ones keeping the Administration from doing anything constructive, automatically and mindlessly saying “No no no no no” to anything Congress or O-bomb-a tries to do? The “Tea Party” phenomenon has been shown, by numerous commentators, to be basically a crock of stupid shit embraced by political imbeciles and moral cretins, who are led around like mindless puppets by raving psychopaths whose rhetorical techniques seem to include crying like a baby, lying like Pinocchio, and fomenting as much fear and hatred as possible. And yet the “Tea-baggers” seem to be growing in strength, which presumably argues for an increasing number of political imbeciles and moral cretins deciding the movement expresses their feelings (I hesitate to credit them with thoughts or ideas). Granted, they have a lot of ammunition in the catastrophic debacle which this Administration has turned out to be, but they themselves are part of the reason for this, another part being the total spinelessness and treachery of the Dummy-crats.

Well, I said this would be brief, and I’ll keep my promise, uncharacteristic as it is for me to be brief. Just thought I’d throw that out and see if anybody would shoot it.

Minimizing environmental impact

Well, now that it’s a foregone conclusion that the entire global ecosystem is going to crash and burn and destroy most life on the planet within about a decade, my liberal instincts are making me feel a little more guilty (groan, beat chest, heap ashes on head) about my environmental footprint. Having just taken an “ecological footprint quiz” at Redefining Progress (www.myfootprint.org/), I am vaguely comforted to learn that my footprint is roughly 63% of the national average, but considering that the national average is scandalous and a crime against humanity, that’s cold comfort. I eat most of my meals out, which is supposed to be a horrendous drain on resources (but supports local labor); I refuse to freeze my ass during winter or fry my ass during summer, which entails horrific energy expenditures. But I do walk reasonable distances to places most other people drive to, and I use a lot less water than most people because of personal hygiene standards which some would consider less than optimal. And a lot of my deficiencies are simply due to the fact that it requires more or less money to correct them by various sorts of technological fixes, and I can’t afford to. I mean, let’s face it, strict environmental conscientiousness is a luxury of the moderately well-off because it costs money. This is, of course, one of the major sticking points at all the international conferences on climate change where profligate wastrels in the developed world tell the poorer nations what they should do to reduce global warming and the poorer nations politely tell them to take a flying fuck at the moon. And if one becomes overly scrupulous and a little paranoid, one can start self-flagellating over such things as using a computer, which some sources say consumes vast amounts of both energy and resources; or eating tofu because of the horrible waste of resources involved in raising food animals, only to find that growing soy beans has its own environmental impact; or even farting too much because of the contribution of methane to global warming. It is, in fact, ultimately impossible to be totally pure environmentally. Living as simply as possible has its own unavoidable impact.

So, I have finally reached the only logical conclusion. You may remember (of course you do) a post on this blog back in 22 August 07 entitled “Save the planet: Kill yourself,” which was about a satirical (we hope) cult called the Church of Euthanasia which recommended just that. Its defining principle was population reduction, but the same logic applies to reduction of environmental impact. The only way to have zero impact is to kill yourself. Unfortunately, your one last impact will be the air pollution involved in cremation, but after that, you can congratulate yourself on having made the ultimate sacrifice to save the planet. Not that it will work, but at least you can feel smug and self-righteous about it up in Heaven while looking down and watching Earth continue to collapse in apocalyptic cataclysm, as well as feeling immensely relieved at having gotten out of it in time.

The end of the world

Some of the readers of this blog may find a welcome respite from the rather tawdry spectacle of political war and general social collapse, in the news that the world is coming to an end on December 21, 2012. Not only is this a peculiarly specific date, but I have even seen one page time it with even more peculiar specificity to 11:11 GMT. It happens to be my 76th birthday, and I can’t think of a better birthday celebration than the end of the world—if I live that long. This peculiarly specific date has been derived from a Mayan calendar called the Mesoamerican Long Count calendar, the first appearance of which dates back to 36 BCE. There are various scenarios for the end of the world, including a collision with some rogue planet called Nibiru (predicted by someone in psychic contact with extra-terrestrials), or an alignment between the Sun and the black hole at the center of the galaxy. Naturally there are the inevitable party-poopers who point out that the Mayan calendar actually doesn’t say anything about the end of the world on that date, but simply the end of one cyclical period and the beginning of another, and that if Nibiru were close enough to Earth to collide on that date, it would already be visible to the naked eye. But of course, true believers are never bothered by facts, as you can tell from two minutes’ conversation with any advocate of Intelligent Design.

I’ve long been fascinated by apocalyptic predictions. And by “apocalyptic,” I do not include predictions of such relatively minor events as the end of civilization as we know it. I’m rather of the opinion that the end of civilization as we know it would be a welcome relief, since civilization as we know it sucks. (Mahatma Gandhi is supposed to have said, when asked what he thought of Western civilization, “I think it would be a good idea.”) Even severe eco-catastrophe probably wouldn’t count as the end of the world, if it did nothing more than rid the planet of that pestilent killer ape species and maybe half the other species on earth. After all, the Cretaceous-Tertiary extinction event 65 million years ago simply got rid of dinosaurs (and an estimated 17% of all families) and paved the way for domesticated primates, and the present extinction event will get rid of them (all right, us) and clear the way for something else, maybe a civilization of dolphins. (Read Olaf Stapledon’s Last and first men [1930], one of the most profound science-fiction works ever written, of which Wikipedia says: “it describes the history of humanity from the present onwards across two billion years and eighteen distinct human species, of which our own is the first and most primitive.” This species, 100,000 years hence, reduces their population to 35 people by a global catastrophe that sounds eerily like a nuclear holocaust, written 15 years before such a thing was imaginable, and these 35 survivors are the progenitors of the Second Men. As visionary as Stapledon was, the idea of eco-catastrophe within a century could not have occurred to him at that time.)

No, the kind of apocalyptic predictions I’m thinking of are those that are characteristic of the various pseudo-Christian millennialist cults, and it is hardly surprising that such ideology is found in the present 2012 movement, although the secular and New Age elements in it may be stronger. Perhaps the basis of the movement in a pagan calendar helps explain the relative weakness of Christian apocalypticism in it. Christians are obviously not the only ones obsessed with the end of the world, but they have formulated what are probably the most elaborate and bizarre theories about it. Most of these doctrines are based on the Revelation of St John, to which have been attributed hundreds of ridiculously asinine ideas which never crossed John’s mind. In fact, the Book of Revelation is often called the Apocalypse of St John. The Book of Daniel also makes its contributions to eschatology because Daniel’s weird dreams were supposed to predict the end of the world.

Of course 2012 is certainly not, by a long stretch, the first apocalyptic prediction in history; depending on how they’re defined, there have been dozens of others. Rather surprisingly, the year 2000 caused more concern about computers crashing than it did about apocalyptic millennialism, even though the date was by definition millennial (in the Christian calendar, at least). Perhaps one of the more famous examples is the event in the history of the Millerite movement (predecessor of the Seventh-Day Adventists) called the Great Disappointment, when William Miller, the founder of the movement, predicted that Jesus would return to earth on 22 October 1844, and convinced thousands of followers to sell all their possessions and wait to be taken up to Heaven. The theological somersaults that the leaders of the movement went through to try to explain why this didn’t happen are good for laughs. And there are other cults and denominations that believe in apocalypses and Second Comings without trying to date them precisely. Jehovah’s Witlesses (as I like to call them) evidently expect to see the Second Coming within the lifetime of any individual believer, even though generations of adherents have been disappointed.

Christian apocalyptic millennialism focuses on such ideas as Armageddon and Anti-Christs and the Second Coming, but it also serves, perhaps primarily for many people, as a quasi-religious explanation for all the shit happening in the world, which is all seen as leading up to the End Times. In general, a movement predicting a certain date for an apocalypse is simply a crystallization of the firm conviction of the social misfits of every generation that the world is so fucked up that it simply can’t, or shouldn’t, go on much longer; and, assuming that it can’t be made any better, the only solution is to wipe things clean and start over. At least there’s something to be said for expecting this to be brought about by more or less natural means or historical events, rather than trying to precipitate it yourself by armed warfare and revolution. But the fact that all past predictions of future dates have been proved wrong by the simple fact that we’re still here and still fucking up, does not stop idiots and fanatics from continuing to predict more future dates. So, stock up your survival supplies for December 2012. Don’t ask me how you’re supposed to survive the end of the world; ask the survivalists. And ask them why they want to. Christian millennialists, of course, don’t expect or want to survive here on Earth because they expect to be taken up to Heaven. Let’s not get into the Rapture, beyond noting the bumper-sticker popular a few years ago which said, “In case of Rapture, this vehicle will be unoccupied.” There are times when I’m so humiliated by the appalling stupidity—not to mention the sheer evil—of some people who call themselves Christians that I’m tempted to become a pagan.

It’s gonna be an exciting, fun-filled three years.

Why am I eating this?

Several people have told me recently that I absolutely must see the new movie Food, Inc., which tells about all the horrible stuff we eat as a result of the food chain having been taken over by the evil food industry and its corporations. Well, as an old failed chemist, I’m already far more aware than I want to be of the shit the evil food corporations want to feed me, and I try to avoid it to a great extent (though I’m not purist enough to avoid it entirely) by not eating their more egregiously disgusting products. In my naïve innocence, I thought I might achieve this in part by buying salads from the deli of the local supermarket—which is, of course, part of the evil conspiracy. And I often read the labels they put on the salad containers, which contain the list of ingredients of these innocuous-looking salads. But I recently paid slightly closer attention than usual to this label and its list for a “cashew chicken salad.” It was quite a revelation.

Blogger won’t let me do formatting, and I have formatted the list by tab-indenting for each of several nested levels, in which the ingredients of sub-components are listed under the components. But you can’t see this, which is a pain in the ass, and a major fault of Blogger, in my opinion. To try to describe it without formatting: the first ingredient is chicken, which is a good start. Then under this is a solution (in which I suppose the chicken is soaked) which has a seasoning with seventeen ingredients. Next major heading is a “rub” with nine ingredients, then a “creamy dressing” with mayonnaise and sour cream, each of which has its list of sub-ingredients, of which the mayonnaise has eight.

At this point, they ran out of space on the label, and they hadn’t even gotten around to the cashews yet! (Makes you wonder what kind of processing they submitted the cashews to.) Or a warning label that says, “This food has been processed in a facility that employs Moslems.” The reason for this is that the nested levels require them to list sub-ingredients present in microscopic quantities before they list macro-level ingredients like cashews and celery. And an old failed chemist has to wonder about some of the ingredients present even in microscopic quantities. Disodium inosinate (in the rub)? What the fuck is that? An old failed chemist might assume it’s a sodium salt of inosinic acid, which I never heard of back when I was flunking Chem 201; but there really is such a thing as inosinic acid—C10H13N4O8P (Blogger doesn't do subscript numbers either—piece of shit), a “nucleotide of hypoxanthine.” Similarly, disodium guanylate (also in the rub) is a sodium salt of guanylic acid, C10H14N5O8P. Calcium disodium EDTA (in the mayonnaise)? Salt of ethylene-diamine-tetra-acetic acid, a chelating agent “capable of producing toxic effects which can be fatal”; so what the fuck is it doing in food? (Are you getting all this? You’ll be tested tomorrow. And I already know it without even seeing the movie.) And there is corn in four different forms—hydrolyzed corn protein and corn syrup solids in the soaking solution, corn starch in the rub, and the ubiquitous corn syrup in the mayonnaise. Corn is everywhere in the industrial food chain and is now regarded as the new villain, for economic as well as dietary reasons. High fructose corn syrup is increasingly replacing sugar as the omnipresent sweetener, since white sugar has long been regarded as another toxin (although it's a major component of the rub anyway), but corn syrup isn’t much better.

Further, a Google on disodium inosinate reveals that the inosinate-guanylate combination is now a standard flavor enhancer comparable to monosodium glutamate (MSG), which has gotten decades of bad press for the allergic reactions it causes, and which the inosinate-guanylate combination is evidently intended to supplant. I’m skeptical enough to take a rather cynical view of some of the more hysterical claims of the food fanatics that MSG and, by association, inosinate-guanylate are deadly toxins, but the fact remains, they are additives that shouldn’t need to be added. Back in the old days, foods had enough flavor on their own so they didn’t need enhancing, but we’re talking about Food, Inc. here. The flavor would not need to be enhanced if it hadn’t already been destroyed by production and processing.

Fortunately, east Boulder County (including Lafayette and Longmont), has a number of “health food” stores where one can shop to avoid the toxic assaults of Food, Inc. By way of contrast to the above, perhaps erring on the side of brevity, an egg salad sandwich made locally and sold at the local Vitamin Cottage lists the following ingredients: “Egg salad (eggs, mayonnaise, mustard, onion, herbs, spices, salt), bread, lettuce (contains eggs & wheat)”. What dark secrets lie hidden in those simple words “mayonnaise” and “bread”? Hopefully not calcium disodium EDTA. The warning that egg salad contains eggs is, of course, consistent with the warning that peanut butter contains peanuts, or that items just removed from the oven may be hot. Anyone selling anything in this degenerate society these days has to assume that everyone is halfwitted, in order to avoid being sued for not telling them the glaringly obvious; unfortunately, the assumption is correct depressingly often. However, rumor has it that the sinister fiends of Food, Inc. are now infiltrating and taking over the “health food” market and passing off their vile poisons under false pretenses. Which naturally (sic!) leads to the boom in farmer’s markets and home gardens. We are gradually learning not to trust any food store—the latest member of the long list of institutions we can’t trust. They’re all out to get us.

So, why do I keep eating this shit? Because it’s cheap and I’m lazy. That’s how they entrap everybody, isn’t it?

Stupid Americans

It’s been a long time since I have seriously considered leaving this country because I can’t stand to watch it go down the tubes. The last time, I think, was when Emperor Ray-gun was elected a second time and churches started offering performances of the Greek Orthodox hymn “O Lord, save thy people.” That was twenty-five years ago, and being 25 years older now, I’m far less resilient for such a major upheaval. On the other hand, now that I have a meager retirement income and don’t have to look for work in Canada, all I have to do is figure out if I can live below the poverty level there. More likely, they’ll use that as a reason for not letting me in in the first place.

I should hardly need to explain what has brought me to this depth of despair. Even the Reign of Terror under Emperor Dubya did not reduce me to such hopelessness because I thought things would get better when he was dethroned. Well, he’s been dethroned by the Great Brown Hope, and all Obama’s attempts to start doing things right are being blocked and thwarted by the lunatic far-right. When I first thought of writing a post on how stupid Americans are, I googled “stupid Americans,” and was so depressed and horrified by what I found that I almost gave up trying to deal with it (although, as you see, it didn’t stop me from trying anyway). I’m beginning to think a growing proportion of the populace is not just stupid, but psychotic as well. Bill Maher has been quoted as saying that the Democrats are moving to the right and the Republicans are moving to an insane asylum. The spectacle of armed maniacs screaming and ranting at public meetings is not something to give one the warmest confidence in where this country is heading. Behavior which in some places and at some times would have gotten its perpetrators put before a firing squad for treason and sedition, is now smiled upon and encouraged, not only by the molders of public opinion but by the molders of public policy.

The google on “stupid Americans” linked to such things as YouTube clips of a journalist interviewing supposedly representative people on the street who can’t name a country beginning with the letter U (like their own), or who think a triangle has one side, or who don’t know what religion Buddhist monks are; and to YouTube clips of Bill Maher’s now infamous (and, frankly, overly glib) rant on 27 July about stupid Americans, which (perhaps justly) won him a lot of flak. (Jay Leno, in his “Jay-walking” segments, used to make fun of the staggeringly moronic answers of people on the street to questions a bright fourth-grader could answer correctly, but I often wondered if people deliberately gave moronic answers so they could be shown on the Tonight Show.) In a 7 August rejoinder to his critics, Maher defended himself by quoting poll statistics showing that “a majority of Americans cannot explain what the Bill of Rights is; 24% could not name the country America fought in the Revolutionary War; more than two-thirds of Americans don’t know what’s in Roe v. Wade”; etc. etc.

But there are also, mostly among the comments to these clips, a few who point out that, horrifying as this ignorance of simple facts is, it is not the only, or even the worst, manifestation of stupidity. What might be considered worse than this is the propensity of stupid Americans to believe preposterous nonsense, such as that dinosaurs and humans occupied the earth at the same time, or that the sun revolves around the earth. Worse yet is their total inability to critically recognize bullshit when they hear it, and their mind-numbing gullibility to the demonically vicious lies fed to them by the far-right demagogues, such as that Obama is a Muslim or was born in Kenya. In fact, the impetus for Maher’s diatribe was the spectacle of the so-called “town hall meetings” on health care being reduced to chaotic free-for-alls by the above-mentioned armed maniacs, many of them thugs paid by the corrupt rackets who profit from the status quo, who were yelling the lies they had been told by those racketeers and by the far-right demagogues, the most patently absurd, and therefore the most cited, being the idea that government death squads will euthanize grandma. There are some radicals who believe that democracy is not supposed to work like this. One of the revolutionary (the small r is deliberate) fathers said something to the effect that democracy could not work unless the citizenry were sufficiently educated to know what they were doing as citizens, and that certainly cannot be said of the majority of people these days; ergo, democracy cannot work, and is not working in this country at the present time and in its present form.

I have often referred to the “Divided States.” A google (I use that a lot, don’t I?) on “Divided States of America” shows that the idea is rather widespread, with a number of scenarios, ranging from the interesting to the bizarre, being put forth as to how our great nation might fragment into separate, autonomous sub-republics in the near or far future. One of the more reasonable divisions suggested for such a fracture is, not surprisingly, based on religion. Michelle Haimoff, commenting (11 Sept 08) in the Huffington Post, says: “It’s time for the two separate countries residing in the United States of America to part ways in peace. There exists an ideological schism so extreme that it no longer makes sense for us to stick together as a nation. Perhaps it’s time to abandon the union that the Civil War maintained. The schism has become increasingly pronounced with each presidential election and it was unmistakable at the recent Democratic and Republican conventions. The rift begins and ends with the political parties’ conception of God.” Grieve for poor Lincoln; there goes the Gettysburg Address down the drain. I may be accused of some regional (and religious) bias for suggesting that such a fracture, which would essentially let the Deep South (along with Texas) re-secede, would very handily separate the great majority of terminally stupid people from the rest of us, although other scenarios suggest isolating Utah and Idaho as an autonomous Mormon republic, or selling Alaska back to Russia (which has nothing to do with religion but makes perfect sense geographically, and would have the additional benefit of getting rid of the moose-shooting beauty queen). However, some scenarios lump Colorado in company I’d rather not keep, but let’s not go there.

So, will the appalling stupidity of the American people lead to the dissolution of the United States? Almost certainly not; but in my dourer moments, one of which is right now, I almost wish it would. Barring that, Canada is beginning to look more and more tempting. Too bad they won’t accept me.

In case you thought I'd died

The possibility exists, of course, that you never even missed me, or even knew I was here in the first place, but I'm used to that. Five months of no pompous blathering--and no excuse for it, which you didn't want anyway. I mean, no real excuse, like being on a long trip or being in hospital. Just the usual: apathy and depression, not giving a shit what happened in the world.

So, why the return? A change of heart? Har har; fat chance. Why would I? Again, no excuse, which you again didn’t want anyway. Have you given up reading this yet? If so, then you didn’t read that question. Are you asleep?

With so much appalling shit happening in the world, far too many instances for me to begin listing, why should anyone give a royal rat’s fuck what happens in the Divided States? And yet, there’s still a part of me that mumbles, in a sort of snarling whine, “What the fuck ever happened to the Golden Age promised us by the Great Brown Hope?” And I’m not by any means the only one who is embittered and disillusioned, not only at his inability to achieve anything substantial of what he promised, but at his perverse ability to do things that nobody who voted for him wants. Cries of “turncoat” and “Bush lite” are growing in volume, and more and more people are shaking their heads and resigning themselves to another four years of essentially business as usual.

And yet, interestingly enough, one of his most vigorous apologists is the Rude Pundit. I find this interesting because Rude is usually eager to disembowel, castrate, and commit endless colorful atrocities on almost anybody and everybody with fervent, pornographic, scatological glee—usually Republicans and right-wingers but also occasionally Dummy-crats whom he thinks are betraying the cause. And yet he responds to the disillusioned critics of O-man with the essential message: Back off and give him a chance. He’s only been in office five months, and before he can build very much positive, he has to clean up the godawful pile of shit he’s been handed that it took the Bush Crime Family eight years to create. Since I’m not clever at embedding links, I’ll quote directly from Rude’s “Barack Obama is not afraid of you and he will kick your ass,” 6/23:

We’re impatient, yes, yes, we are. The deluded who thought they were getting beautiful Barack to ride in on a giant stallion and slay the big, bad Bush machine are impatient. The realists who knew they were getting a really damn smart, slightly left of center guy in Obama and not an avenging liberal, they’re impatient, too.

. . . it’s gonna take a fuck of a lot of work to get us back to zero, to the way things were before George W. Bush came in and pissed on our beds, raped our dogs, tied us up, set the house on fire, and left without calling 911. And then, once it’s back to zero, we can talk about how it gets better. Doesn’t make any of us less impatient and it doesn’t excuse some of the shit Obama’s doing (like continuing to argue the Bush administration side on cases left over from it), but we gotta recognize that the circumstances are: “We’re fucked – can we be un-fucked?”

Well, perhaps “impatient” is a kinder way of putting it than “embittered and disillusioned,” and Rude himself mentions some of the things Obama has failed to do that he promised, or did that we think he shouldn’t have. And as I said earlier about Mark Udall (4 Oct 08, “Preaching to the choir”), I suppose Obama must be given credit for trying to work bipartisanly with the Right, even though they adamantly refuse to cooperate with him and it basically means hopelessly compromising all the principles on the basis of which he was elected. And yet, despite Rude’s call for patience and all attempts to give O-man credit where credit is due, I’m still embittered and disillusioned and feeling deeply betrayed, and my instincts for anarchy are once more vindicated. Any and all change that occurs will be for the worse, and I look forward to the imminent collapse of civilization and the global ecosystem with dour apathy.

Life, liberty, and the pursuit of mind-numbing opiates

Once more, another Codependence Day has come and gone, and I’m reminded that all the fireworks that everybody loves so much are actually stylized warfare. “The rockets’ red glare, the bombs bursting in air” was penned by Francis Scott Keyhole during the Battle of Baltimore in the War of 1812, and was not about fireworks. Granted, adding the salts of strontium, calcium, barium, sodium, magnesium, and copper to the gunpowder does make for prettier blasts than your basic improvised explosive device, but the principle is the same. This year I didn’t attend any of the public celebrations but sat inside the house in Longmont that I was taking care of for relatives. But I could clearly hear all the explosions not far away, and I had the eerie feeling of almost being able to imagine I was in a house in Kirkuk, Iraq, with a real war raging outside. There were times during the Reign of Terror (2001–08) when I was almost in favor of another revolution, except that without the wisdom of people like Adams, Jefferson, Madison, Washington, Franklin, Paine, et al., we’d probably royally fuck up another one, like the French and the Russians did with theirs; and the fascist thugs in control at the time probably wouldn’t have hesitated to machine-gun us in the streets.

I did not fly or wave any flags for the big day; if I were to fly any flag, it would be the Earth flag. At the place where I was working about twenty years ago, someone started taking donations to buy a flagpole to put out front, and I told them I’d contribute if they’d fly the Earth flag above the United States flag, since the Earth had obvious precedence over the U.S., having existed very nicely without it for several billion years, whereas the U.S. self-evidently could not exist at all without the Earth. The look I got suggested they probably thought I was some kind of Commie radical. (Nope, just a hippie tree-hugger.)

You shall have no other gods . . .

I’m beginning this at 11:10 Tuesday 20, immediately after having watched the inauguration of Obama on TV. It was indeed a stirring and historical event, the inauguration speech full of moving and inspiring rhetoric and memorable lines, shots of weeping girls and women everywhere, all very heartwarming. And yet, in spite of Obama’s explicit scolding and chastisement of cynics who think nothing can change for the better, I’m an old dog resistant to learning new tricks. Maybe I’ve been reading too much Joe Bageant and “Gloom and doom report.” But actually, I’m not really cynical so much as I’m worried.

My last post here (“News flash,” 22 Nov 08), almost two months ago but two weeks after the Great Victory, was a gentle, Onion-like satire depicting the public’s perception of Obama as a sort of Christ-like miracle-worker. What I saw this morning only more strongly confirmed that impression. There was a distinct air of adoration, even worship, which made me very uneasy. Notwithstanding the title of this post, it doesn’t really have much to do with idolatry, though a case might be made for that. It’s just that I think everybody is expecting entirely too much of this man, much of which may simply be impossible for him or anyone else to accomplish, not just in four years, but ever. I’m sure he will effect a great deal of beneficial change, but I’m equally sure that he will not meet everyone’s expectations, simply because many of those expectations are wildly unrealistic. He is human, and therefore fallible. He will inevitably make mistakes; and unfortunately, much of what he does right will probably be perceived as wrong by those who had a conflicting agenda. And when he is seen to make mistakes, whether real or perceived, he will be mercilessly and savagely crucified, not only by his diehard enemies but by all his worshipers who expected him to fulfill all their dreams. For those Christians familiar with the Passion narrative, remember what happened to Jesus between Palm Sunday and Maundy Thursday. Every president, of course, has a honeymoon of indeterminate duration, and what happens when the honeymoon is over and his worshipers discover he has clay feet, and how he deals with their disillusionment and fury, will to a great extent determine what the remainder of the term will be like. We can only hope and pray for the best, or even just the acceptable, but an inveterate cynic and curmudgeon finds that difficult to do with any conviction.

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.