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?”