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.
Thursday, August 27, 2009
Monday, July 6, 2009
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:
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.)
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.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.
. . . 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?”
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.)
Tuesday, January 20, 2009
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.
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.
Saturday, November 22, 2008
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.
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.
Monday, November 10, 2008
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.
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.
Tuesday, November 4, 2008
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!
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!
Tuesday, October 21, 2008
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?
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?
Subscribe to:
Posts (Atom)