I've Been Thinking Lately

There's a good chance you've seen this old chestnut somewhere.

"The problem not only with fundamentalist Christians but with Republicans in general is not that they act on blind faith, without thinking. The problem is that they are incorrigible doubters with an insatiable appetite for Evidence. What they get off on is not Believing, but in having their beliefs tested. That's why their conversations and their media are so completely dominated by implacable bogeymen: marrying gays, liberals, the ACLU, Sean Penn, Europeans and so on. Their faith both in God and in their political convictions is too weak to survive without an unceasing string of real and imaginary confrontations with those people — and for those confrontations, they are constantly assembling evidence and facts to make their case.

But here's the twist. They are not looking for facts with which to defeat opponents. They are looking for facts that ensure them an ever-expanding roster of opponents. They can be correct facts, incorrect facts, irrelevant facts, it doesn't matter. The point is not to win the argument, the point is to make sure the argument never stops. Permanent war isn't a policy imposed from above; it's an emotional imperative that rises from the bottom. In a way, it actually helps if the fact is dubious or untrue (like the Swift-boat business), because that guarantees an argument. You're arguing the particulars, where you're right, while they're arguing the underlying generalities, where they are.

Once you grasp this fact, you're a long way to understanding what the Hannitys and Limbaughs figured out long ago: These people will swallow anything you feed them, so long as it leaves them with a demon to wrestle with in their dreams."
Matt Talabi

And thenyesterday came this nugget from Andrew Sullivan on the tranquil (for us) 1990's:

"...There's always a paradox in professional conservatives lamenting happy times, because it both encourages less government and increases their irrelevance as public commentators. But there's a strain in some neoconservatism that can sometimes appear actually hostile to tranquillity because it is seen as a cause of what Krauthammer calls ennui, of boredom, of decadence. "Trivial history" is another term, in some ways, for peace and prosperity, in which our private lives take center stage and the tedium of politics, folly of war, and grinding millstone of poverty are kept at bay."http://andrewsullivan.theatlantic.com/the_daily_dish/2009/12/conservatism-and-the-1990s.html#more

The human mind is,of course, hard-wired to focus primarily on other people. It is nearly impossible for the mind to form a self-imagethat isn't based on comparision against other people, and it is very difficult to produce an image of moral self-worth beyond that of better than.

Conflict with 'The Other' than, is not based only on ignorant assuming the worst of what we don't understand, but also on a concious belief that right and wrong can not exist without conflict with those things and those people who are clearly identified as wrong. Those who subscribe to Eco's ninth point of instinctive fascism " For Ur-Fascism there is no struggle for life but, rather, life is lived for struggle." do not consider a life that consists of eternal struggle to be a grim curse, rather they are thankful that the life of struggle has provided them with a meaning that could not otherwise exist. The existence of evil is the basis of morality, and good cannot exist in any other form except violent opposisition to evil. Those who pursue peace pursue nihilism. The murderers of Ghandi, Sadat, and Rabin believed that they were saving virtue from extinction.

When Don Quixote is brought back to his senses, he enters a despair that lasts until he dies soon after. Alonso Quixano would rather be dead than live in a world in which damsels are not being eternally threatened by giants.

It is only natural that it is the right who is most enamored with the idea of hatred of the enemy as the basis of both personal and social identity and virtue; because all traditional social structures are predicated on chivalry. Those at the top of the hierarchy earn their privledges by defending (In the case of the West) the eternally childlike poor, brown, and female from an uneneding stream of outside threats. In order for "The Man" to be justified in his power it is essential for society to be forever on the brink of collapse. Anything less than eternal crisis betrays the old gender, race, and class based distinctions as arbitary and imaginary, which of course is nothing but the truth of what they are.



This is why, with the exception of some riot-happy anarchist chuckleheads (who are just as enamored with conflict as the institutional right, and for largly the same reasons) the left has historically been so vehemently opposed to war. The opposition to war is not based merely on a squeamishness towards death, (though I for one freely admit to being squeamish towards death and am disgusted by those who brag that they are not.) but on the knowledge that war is the primary means of creating false conciousness.(Yeah. I went there) The essense of war is not conflict with the enemy but religious sacrifice to the ideal of conflict with the enemy. It is the means of engineering an existance that is both much shorter than it otherwise could be and also wholly fraudulant. War is the means for creating and perpetuating a fraudulant society, fraudulant loyalty, fraudulant identity, fraudulant love, fraudulant hate, and fradulant morality.

And at the risk of coing across as a hypocrite, it is a fraud that I fear we are stuck with forever. As long as humans are unable to accept life on its own terms, for as long as we are made dull by the mundanities of working, sleeping, and eating, for as long as we are aware that even joy, sex, dance and beauty will eventually become mundane, for as long as we are unable to look out of eyes and conclude, "we are here and that is enough." the fraud will be irrisitibly seductive. It is only the ability to feel and inflict pain that enables us to become heroes, and it is only by being a hero that one can become a god.

Earthquake Update.

I have just received word that the Auburn tremor has opened up a pathway to hell itself, and that President Obama has taken advantage of the situation to summon Anwar Sadat from the underworld to lead an uprising of undead Muslim socialists against against the brave Christian warriors of real America. Stay tuned.

EarthQuake Strikes Auburn Nebraska!!!

Stay tuned to Mr. Heartland for further developments as they happen.

In Honor of The Decade: Remembering the Clear Channel post-9/11 Censored List

Here's some songs on the list that never would of reminded any sane person of the attacks, but now make you giggle darkly and feel like a horrid bastard afterwards. (Or perhaps I should speak for myself)

Barenaked Ladies "Falling for the First Time"


Pat Benatar "Hit Me with Your Best Shot"

Boston "Smokin"

Dave Matthews Band "Crash into Me"

Dio "Holy Diver"

Filter "Hey Man, Nice Shot"

The Gap Band "You Dropped a Bomb on Me"

Elton John "Rocket Man"

John Mellencamp "Crumblin' Down"

The Smashing Pumpkins "Bullet with Butterfly Wings"

Sugar Ray "Fly"

Van Halen "Jump"

And finally the one in which the black humor is undeniable to even the most patriotic and God fearing

Elton John "Bennie and the Jets"

I think "Bennie and the Jets" really catches the deranged, meth-high feeling of liberation that is the true inspiration for terrorist acts, that joy of anti-sex, destroying what has been created. "Bennie" is the obvious anthem for any hyper-intelligent merry prankster terrorist in the vein of a Joker or a Tyler Durden. It would certainly be my theme song if I were a terrorist, unless Ween's "Push the Little Daisies" hasn't already been taken.

You Learn Something new everyday

http://www.powerlineblog.com/archives/2009/12/025144.php



Note the identical, professionally printed, color-coordinated yellow and black signs. This is what Astroturf--fake grass roots--looks like. The signs use the same colors as the International ANSWER signs that are ubiquitous at far-left rallies here in the U.S., but carry no identifier. It would be interesting to know who paid for the signs, and whether the same organization that bought the signs also paid for the demonstrators.

Pre-prepaired, coordinated picket signs are indisputible evidence of insincerity, in ways that are never quite explained or need to be.

It trully must be marvelous to be a Real American, what with the power to create your own reality and all. The rest of us are reduced to downing cheap bathtub acid. Pity us.

Post 601

I've been coming down from a cold I've had since Tuesday, not quite well enough to take up smoking again but well enough to stay awake for more than three hours at a time. Slept through the hellstorm for the most part and couldn't be happier that I did, though the snow-party shenanigans did sound kind of fun in my sort of semi-consciousness.

It might have been the punches I took to both sinuses on Saturday Night,when I tried to break up a fist fight between a fat Lakota fellow and his mother, that left me susceptible to the cold. I met them and his cousin at the Beacon Lounge, the cousin is a nice girl of 25 who took a liking to me. She called back after I made it home to see if I was okay and I said yes. She called back the next day to ask me why I hadn't met up with her like I said I would. (?) I told her I had forgotten the exact address of her apartment which was the truth. I've also forgotten her name which I didn't mention. She texted me from a couple of different phones that night and hasn't contacted me since and that will do.

I don't remember if I took any swings back at the big fellow. I said something about what a disgrace it was, to see a son fighting his mother. I took offense. I was drunk; the punches didn't hurt all that much, and I was surprised to have two black eyes the next day. They're mostly cleared up now. The cousin, she told me they all went to jail, mother son and someone else. Whether they've been bailed out by now or not I don't know. She hasn't called me back, like I said, and I'm not going to call her.

It was also at the Beacon where I saw a thirty-something woman get a tooth knocked out by the man she shot down. This was Wednesday night. It started out as a brawl between the suitor and the woman's friend-with-benefits, he turned on her when she tried to pull them apart. He knocked her to the ground and than I tried to pull him off of her but couldn't do it until a couple of black guys coming out of the Night Before helped us out.

Three cops showed up. They surrounded the black guys until me and the woman told them three or four times that they weren't involved, this in spite of the fact that they were wholly unbruised and I was the only White cat in the crowd who wasn't. The cops were clearly acting on autopilot. Accuse them of bias and they'll deny it with perfect conscious honesty.

And of course I'm back in Nebraska for a little bit. I don't mention that any of the white people are mentioned because here we are nine out of ten as always. Well not quite always. It really would be better if the Indian woman didn't call back though I like her well enough, and feel bad about not knowing her name.

I waited with the Wednesday white woman for a few minutes until her boy had convinced the cops that the other fellow was the aggressor and they let him go. She spat blood on the sidewalk and mourned her lost tooth, and rightfully so. She's average looking, one of the most average looking creatures of any kind or sex I've ever seen. Give her a full set of teeth and she's average in a comforting sort of way. Take a away a tooth or two and she's average in a slow decay of life sort of way. God damn disgrace that rat fuck. Clearly a low-level sociopath; she would have been beyond stupid to get anywhere near him. Now here she was spitting blood on the sidewalk as a reward for not being stupid.

Hell of a game Saturday Night wasn't it? It reminded me of the old big 8 games between Nebraska and Oklahoma, Nebraska and Colorado. Any touchdown at any point of the game could be the one that wins it and every inch was such a God-Damned struggle. I think I learned to tolerate and even appreciate the low scoring nature of soccer watching these games growing up. Hopelessly bashing your way towards the impossible goal that you must have. It's the sort of game where even the rational and libertine become fascists at heart for a couple of hours. We start to believe that success or failure depends solely on our collective will. We will win as long as I keep staring at the screen very hard and think of nothing else and we will lose if I blink, and all the while the teams pound each other to hopeless stalemate while the clock dwindles and the inevitable big fuckup looms larger and more unsurvivable. That's what entertainment is; absolute power over an audience of millions and total impotence on a field of twenty two. That's fucking Midwestern man, to find diversion in other people creating your unwinable struggles for you on some wretched December night.

POST 600

In the future, when your children ask what that burning smell is, your answer will be 'everything'.

Currently

I am watching the Alabama Crimson Tide disprove Christianity.

World Cup Predictions

Group A
1. South Africa
2. France
3. Mexico
4. Uruguay

Group B

1. Nigeria
2. Argentina
3. Greece
4. South Korea

Group C

1. England
2. USA
3. Algeria
4. Slovenia

Group D

1. Germany
2. Ghana
3. Australia
4. Serbia

Group E

1. Netherlands
2. Cameroon
3. Denmark
4. Japan

Group F

1. Italy
2. Paraguay
3. Slovakia
4. New Zealand

Group G

1. Brazil
2. Ivory Coast
3. Portugal
4. North Korea

Group H

1. Spain
2. Chile
3. Switzerland
4. Honduras


Round of 16
Argentina 1-0 over South Africa
England 1-0 over Ghana
Netherlands 2-0 over Paraguay
Brazil 4-1 over Chile
Nigeria 3-2 over France
Germany 2-1 over USA
Cameroon on PK's over Italy after 1-1 draw
Spain 3-2 over Ivory Coast

Quarterfinals
England 2-1 over Argentina
Brazil 2-1 a.e.t over Netherlands
Nigeria 1-0 over Germany
Spain 2-1 over Cameroon

Semifinals
Brazil on PK's after 1-1 draw with England
Spain 2-1 a.e.t over Nigeria

3rd place
Nigeria on PK's after scoreless draw with England

Championship
Spain 3-2 over Brazil

Best Of Decade Lists? Sure I'll Whore Out

10 Best Songs:

1. B.O.B.-Outkast
2. Do You Realize?-The Flaming Lips
3. The Seed 2.0-The Roots & Cody Chestnutt
4. The National Anthem-Radiohead
5. Fuck Her Gently-Tenacious D
6. House of Jealous Lovers-The Rapture
7. Seven Nation Army-The White Stripes
8. I Wish I Was The Moon-Neko Case
9. 99 Problems- Jay Z
10. I Believe In A Thing Called Love-The Darkness

10 Best Albums:

1. Whiskey Hotel Foxtrot-Wilco
2. In Rainbows-Radiohead
3. Lateralus-Tool
4. Stankonia-Outkast
5. Yoshimi Battles The Pink Robots-The Flaming Lips
6. The Sunlandic Twins-Of Montreal
7. The Love Below-Outkast (Andre 3000)
8. Fox Confessor Brings The Flood-Neko Case
9. The Blueprint-Jay-Z
10. Soviet Kitsch-Regina Spektor
10. Elephant-The White Stripes

You're A Rat Fuck Thierry Henry

Or, "How The Black Charlie Brown Stole A World Cup Spot"




The governing body for European soccer, UEFA, rewards its allocated World Cup spots by dividing the fifty three countries into home-and-away groups of five or six, taking care to make sure that traditional powers like Italy, Germany, France, and Spain are not put in the same group. Group winners go straight to the cup. A second-place team has to win a home-and-away playoff against another runner-up to earn a spot.

The playoff between France and Ireland was set up when the Irish, a perennial WC bubble team, finished second to Italy as expected in their qualifying group, whereas the historically very good but inconsistent French were upset by Serbia in theirs.
The French were favored from the moment the match was set up, and looked to be on cruise control after winning the first game in Dublin 1-0. But the Irish fought hard in Paris to earn an identical 1-0 away win and force overtime.

It was there that Thierry Henry, who has been one of the games best for as long as he's been playing and had been generally regarded as a decent guy, commited a blatant and obviously intentional handball to control a free-kick that otherwise would have gone out of bounds and allowed the Irish to boot it out of their danger zone. Instead Henry was able to use his illegal control to flip the ball to teammate William Gallas who kicked the winning goal.
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2009/11/18/thierry-henry-handball-go_n_363155.html

Henry to his credit admitted to handling the ball after the game, even saying in effect that the referee should have called the foul if he had only caught him, but he didn't so yay for us. This could possibly spare him the life-long enmity that the English-speaking world has for Diego Maradona, who was maddingly coy after the 'hand of God' incident in 1986. Probably not though. Henry insists that the handball was accidental, and the video makes it clear that it was a perfectly conscious act of motor control. And then there is the fact that it usually takes the Irish about a thousand years or so to forgive historical wrongs. We can be assured that the next time Henry's club team, Barcelona, gets matched up in the Champions League against a team with strong Irish support, such as Man U or Celtic, extreme nastiness will ensue.

While the Sweedish referee was not directly next to Henry when the incident occured, he was nearby and looking in the general area when it happened, and the fact that he allowed such an obvious foul to determine who did and who didn't go to the World Cup is unacceptable. There have been some internet rumblings about a conspiracy. Some people are convinced that the ref was instructed by FIFA or UEFA to make sure that the team representing the larger and more populous France made it into the cup and brought their television revenue with them. This is I suppose possible but not likely. The gap in size and international clout between Russia and Slovenia is much greater after all, but that didn't stop the Fighting Gulags from going down. It's more likely that the ref was half-consciously influenced by eighty thousand home fans proclaiming their side to be the good guys, and this is something that happens in every sport. It's a shame but human nature is what it is.

As someone with a hint of Irish in my genes I myself am slightly pissed, but mainly because team USA was busy getting torn apart in a friendly at the same time Ireland vs. France was going down and so American audiences were denied the chance to see an outstanding game. If UEFA had the same delusions about winning over the US that the NFL has about finding an obvious in Europe, they would have made sure that France vs. Ireland and USA's debacle at Denmark would have been in different time slots. The matchup between two Western European cultural cousins was, after all, the game that held the most interest for U.S soccer fans. Instead the only qualifier we were treated to was the terribly grim affair between Ukraine and Greece.

It reminds me of another great sporting moment that I missed, the 'Janet Jackson shows her tit' incident from the Super Bowl halftime show a few years back. I was attending a SB party where everyone else had started drinking three hours before the game so that I was the only one still awake by the time halftime came along. I remember the halftime show as being insufferably awful, so much so that when Janet busted out "Rhythm Nation" it was like hearing Jimi Hendrix at Woodstock by comparision. At the end of the show I had my head buried in my hands to make the awfulness disappear and the only hint I got that something interesting had happened was the sleepy mouth-agape look I saw on this guy named Pete from accross the room. The controversy that followed left me quite uncomfortable, like I was a political exile cut off from the world, and I've made a point to be vicariously in the thick of things via the internet ever since. So here I am.

I Knew This Guy as A Teenager

Shane maybe? He sold me some weed and some of his moms prescription pills when I was sixteen. Huge Marilyn Mansion fan. He told me he had been in an orgy with three girls in the town cemetary.

Such equisite bullshit. Delivered with such confidence. I've always admired that guy. Fuck him all the same.

Carmen Sandiego Porn

I was hoping to find something a little sweeter, more satin and candlelight eh? For shame.

Come see me whenever you get tired of getting hurt Carmen.

Yo Greg Harper, Come and Get me Bitch

"In a new interview with Rep. Gregg Harper (R-MS), Politico asks the congressman what the Congressional Sportsmen’s Caucus does. Harper’s response:

We hunt liberal, tree-hugging Democrats, although it does seem like a waste of good ammunition."

An obsession with pure manliness and violent assertion of power is most commonly associated with right-wingers and overwieght boys who drop out of third grade at the age of 12, but I repeat myself.

It's not hard to understand. When men of a particular ethnic group dominate a multi-ethnic society for any length of time they become unable to seperate their control of society from their own sense of manhood, and when they start to lose their traditional power....

Well, there have been an awful lot of white men in the past forty years have gotten awful fixated with GUNS and the fear of having their GUNS torn away from them. Like I said, it's not hard to understand.

The portrayal of every liberal female politician as a lesbian ball-buster, the rise of a partiular strain of Protestantism which proclaims a violently jealous skyfather who cares for little more than the endless praise and submission of his children, an endless stream of cinematic revenge fantisies, in which a rightous white man uses his GUN to mow down the killers of his wife or children, killers who are invaribly dark or, if not dark, the sort of white people who have negated their whiteness by getting involved with drugs. (Drugs equal pleasure, the need for pleasure betrays vulnerability, vulnerability equals effeminacy.) It is all pornographicly easy to understand.

And of course to the man whose sense of manhood is based on social dominance there is nothing more threatening to him than democracy itself. (Especially a democracy whose demographics are turning against him.) Democracy requires its citizens to consider those who disagree with them to be, at worst, well-meaning idiots. It requires us to accept that those who disagree with us are acting in good faith and doing what they sincerely believe is best for the country. Moral certainty provides the same sort of testosterone rush that comes with lifting a hundred pound weight or successfully seducing a beautiful woman. So does the belief that you live in a society that is innately just, one that always puts the most well deserving people in positions of privledge and that the most deserving people just happen to be you and yours. To accept democracy is to deny oneself this masculine rush. It is to accept that fair and honest elections will occasionaly put the Other ones in charge to enact their opposing policies. Worst of all it means to accept that those who disagree with your most passionatly-held principles are your moral and social equals. This neccesarily requires one to accept that his most passionatly held principles could be wrong. To live with the internal doubt that freedom demands is to accept ones vulnerability, and as stated before only women bleed.

This is why right-wing rhetoric is so full of strawmen and ad hominems, so full of apocylyptic dreams of crushing internal and external enemies with supreme confidence and will. For them it is not enough to believe that they are right. Belief leaves room for vulnerability. They must KNOW that they are right. The truth of their beliefs must be so obvious that even those who disagree with them secretly know that they are wrong, and are only pretending to disagree beacuse of some hidden evil motive. Right-wing argument violates the rules of logical debate so often because, in a world where abstract truth is as obvious as the color of the sky, there is no need for logic.

And so we have stabbed-in-the-back mythologies to explain the failures in Vietnam and Iraq. Womanly doubt is the only possible reason why indisputibly just White male power would ever fail to impose its infallible will abroad.

And so we have a long history of bullying language and behavior towards liberals, Democrats, uppity women and minorities, gays, lesbians, foreigners, eggheads, hippies, city boys, and every other strain of social outsider or vaginal skeptic.

We Come Unarmed, This Time.-Various 'Teabaggers' at recent protests

"We're going to keep on building the party (the Texas GOP) until we're hunting Democrats with dogs." Phill Gramm, 1995
Wouldn't it be great if anybody who speaks out against this country, to kick them out of the country? Anybody that threatens this country, kick 'em out. We'd get rid of Michael Moore, we'd get rid of half the Democratic Party if we would just import that law. That would be fabulous. The Supreme Court ought to look into this. Absolutely brilliant idea out there.-Rush Limbaugh, 2005




I am a United States sailor. I have chosen to defend my country and the freedom some take for granted.
I love my country, my family, my freedom. Only by the blood which was shed by the service members before me did we receive this freedom.
There are some, though, who do not appreciate this freedom. I call these people traitors; they call themselves protesters. They are nothing more than an infectious disease that infests the minds and hearts of the Americans we are defending. It consumes the honor and courage within its host until it kills the very patriotism that made this country.
There is no cure for this disease. Never will everyone be satisfied. But let it be known what this guardian of America's freedom thinks of these protesters: Traitors should be hanged. I hold our enemies in higher standing. At least they are willing to fight for their beliefs and the country they love.
Sonar Technician
Derik L.Jobe
U.S. Navy
Amarillo-Letter to the editor of The Amarillo Globe December 2003

And how could we forget the old grandaddy?

I wanna tell you, ladies and gentlemen, that there's not enough troops in the army to force the Southern people to break down segregation and admit the nigger race into our theaters, into our swimming pools, into our homes, and into our churches-Strom Thurmond, 1948.

The Thurmond quote of course comes from the days when lynchings of both Black men and liberal White "outside agitators" was common practice in the South, especially in Mississippi. Indeed the most famous act of terrorism against the civil rights movement, the Chaney-Goodman-Schwerner murders, happened in Greg Harper's district. Happy fucking hunting you worthless piece of illiterate daughter-raping cracker-ass Nazi puddle of diaretic rat shit.

I'm kidding.

The thuggish language is nothing new. Putting it in the form of a "joke" is. Harper learned that one from Angry white Man radio. Tell a "joke" about liberals being a bunch of Commufaggot traitors who are going to get us all killed and than you can paint anyone who calls you out on your joke as a humorless p.c. nancy. But this tactic isn't really fooling anyone. We all know that the violent language is meant to intimidate, and that the drunken tough-guy language is descended from more direct forms of intimidation.

And I'm afraid that the brutish talk isn't going away. Because the right wing is unable to look itself in the mirror unless it has convinced itself that it is in a position of dominance over its enemies. (aka: Everyone else on Earth) If electorial reality denies them this need for dominance, they can always latch on to some minor political setback for President Obama or other Democrats (Such as Chicago losing out on the Olympics. Feel free to keep shitting on my city fellas. It's doing wonders to change our minds about you.) as evidence that the tide is turning and the wayward nation will soon be back in the right's burly arms where she belongs. The twenty four hour news cycle, with its essential tendency to blow up the importance of day-to-day political hubbub, is a great facilitator for this sort of self-delusion.

Or failing that, they can just talk tough, and indeed talking tough is the far- rights weapon of choice for any political situation. It is through threatining talk that they convince themselves that they are Titans among men, that they need not even think of compromise or nogotiation, that they need only apply their indisputibly superior force to assert their perfect will.

Mostly they will talk tough because they will always believe that it works no matter how many times it doesn't. Beacuse they sincerely believe that we liberals secretly know that they are right and we are wrong. Beacuse they really do believe that we are the weak, cowardly, and effeminate strawmen they have made out of us. They truly do believe that suburban moderates swung the election to Obama not because they were disgusted with right-wing governments failures (Which cannot possibly exist) but because white guilt and mushy-headedness led them to be seduced by mindless calls for 'change.' They truly believe that all they have to do to win these mushy-headed children back is to cow faggy liberal voices into silence.

It is indeed true that a high degree of passion for one's beliefs can better inspire one to fight for them when they are threatened. But again, the far right thinks that they are the only ones who truly believe what they believe. At any rate they think that beliefs are confirmed and validated only through the violent assertion of them, an attitude embodied in the hang-happy Texas sailor's letter to the editor. (The best demonstration I've yet seen of how the American right and Islamist terroists are quite a bit like each other.) There is no such thing as a grudging willingness to fight for one's beliefs. There is no such thing as fighting as a last resort. To be willing to fight for one's beliefs is neccesarily to feel overwhelming lust to fight for one's beliefs. Those who claim to be willing to fight only as a last resort are nothing but dishonest pacifists. The entire right-wing mindset is designed to maintain perpetual self-assurance, and the belief that they are the only ones with the balls to fight is the cornerstone of this self-assurance.

And of course it's not just jokes about murdering fellow citizens. Many of the most unhinged rightists are talking (talking at least)in utterly serious terms about taking back 'their' country through force. Death threats against President Obama are four times what is normal for any given president. Newsmax columnist John Perry has helpfully suggested a military coup. A new video game lets the player start his very own Wolverine Brigade to stike down Obama's Socialistic youth Corps.

And then there's the odd case of abortion doctors being murdured and Unitarians being massacred.

It will get uglier before it goes away. We are in the midst of a right-wing death roll. Their claims to ownership of American society will grow steadily louder and angrier as more and more Americans reject their barbarity, to which they will respond by growing louder and angrier, because it is the indisputible cure to all ills. Gays, immigrants, labor activists, and liberal politicians will face harrassment and intimidation. Some will die. It will get uglier, but at least we can take the death roll as proof that we have already won.

Where is their pemenent majority? If only they had been just a little less obvious about ruling the world as a Christian White man's world. There was a time when the GOP actually could have had a viable coalition for post-white majority America. Muslim immigrants from conservative cultures tended to vote Republican in 2000. A thing or two has happened since then to change that. The old game of power elites suckering poor-and poorly educated white men into thinking that they were among the elite has finally blown back on them, for it was this army of Real Americans that scared away Latinos who had been evenly divided between Bush and Gore. Even the military, which not long ago was overwhelmingly Republican and offered as proof of conservtism's superior virility, is no longer a solid GOP voting block. They have learned that "Vietnam syndrome" was not such a bad thing after all; that a government who faithfully believes that the military can do everything will command it to do exactly that.

So now the far right's oldest and most dreaded nightmare; sociopolitical impotance, has arrived; and since they have oppressed, terrorized, villified, marginalized, dismmissed, and demonized every rising demographic group in the country, there is a good chance that this impotance is permenent. Oh how sweet it is to hear the dying monster snarl as if it still has the power to scare anyone.

Still let the snarl be a reminder that a bang and a whimper can be the same thing.

Can't Decide If I like the Crucifix Gun or the Belt Gun More

Ah who am I kidding, I'm firing my belt gun right now.

Food Riots, Ghost Malls, Mob Rule, Terror

The spectre of minority/underclass revolution has always been used by American puppetmasters to keep lower class white males, (who imagine themselves to be members of the ruling class by virtue of being white males) terrified and in line.

The poor and brown are wild beastmen who must be kept under heel, otherwise the smallest taste of power will inspire them to take their savage vengence upon our womenfolk. There was a time when this idea was the accepted common wisdom, firmly believed by preachers and presidents. One was simply not a sane and responsible citizen unless he knew that the monkeys were coming for his daughter.

Over time this situation has seemingly reversed itself. While it was once commonsensical to believe that sharing a true democaracy with the underclass would lead to a maelstorm of anarchy and rape, it has now become dispeputible to believe such nonsense; or rather to express such belief directly. No politician would dare run on an overt platform of keeping poor people in the gutter where they belong, he'll just rail about imaginary welfare queens. I have lots of Mexican friends, but I just can't stand Illegal immigrants beacuse I have so much respect for the Law damnit. Out here on the virgin praries crystal meth was unheard of until they came along, everyone knows that. No one believes that Black people are inherently dangerous, oh heavens no, but of course everyone knows that they are more likely to be violent criminals, never mind any liberal media study that tells us otherwise, we know the commensense truth. It's not because we believe that Blacks are genetically inferior, of course not. It's the culture of poverty don't you know? Liberal welfare policies fostering a culture of dependence. They just haven't learned the value of working hard to earn what God says you deserve, like we have.

So of course we have by far the highest prison incarceration rate in the world. We just care about the safety of out children more than other folks don't you know. We understand what good and evil better than they do, and we know how important it is to harshly punish criminals without any weakkneediness about it.

And of course most of the people in jail are poor minorities. It's the culture of dependence, like we said earlier. It's not like we think that they're innately evil. Heavens no. Unless they're selling drugs. If were not man enough to just shoot all the dealers and junkies in the head than at least we can keep building prisons to keep the bastards locked up until they rot. Did you hear about that Mexican over in Peoria who was high on meth and fed threw his baby boy into a wood chipper? Oh it's terrible. Half the hookers you see on the street these days actually grew up in good whi--- Christian families and got hooked up with drugs. It's terrible. Why don't those liberals stop worrying about the so-called rights of these monsters and let the police do their jobs? What sort of place is this country going to be when our kids grow up Thelma?

So to make a long rant short respectible society has replaced overt belief that the mud people are coming to get us with dull self-rightousness toward vices that just so happen to be associated with the poor and brown.

The election of President Hussein Obama has predictibly pushed old fears of apocalyptic social levelling into overdrive, indeed further into the political mainstream since the days of Nixon; but not far enough into the mainstream to prod the more stable elements of conservative leadership to spout anything more than coded dismissal of any vaguely Newdealish proposal from the White House as 'radical' and 'a threat to our way of life.' Those who directly express their dread of the peasents overturning all that is holy remain in the margins.

But in the internet age the voices of the marginalized are as easily accessed as all of the old media stalwarts, and the world is a much brighter place for it. In the old days one had to sift through the local paper for weeks before finally coming accross some masterpiece of flouride& black helicopter lunacy on the letters page. Today we have internet zines like World Net Daily (known best as the main voice of the birther movement) to give us that sweet dose of shit-scared cracker nutcase whenever we want it.

And oh shit are they ever scared. 'Trend forcaster' Gerald Celente paints WND's Bob Unruh a future vision of "Food riots, tax protests, farmer rebellions, student revolts, squatter diggins, homeless uprisings, tent cities, ghost malls, general strikes, bossnappings, kidnappings, industrial saboteurs, gang warfare, mob rule, terror,"

"This is the decline of empire America."

"Now comes his forecast for a global depression and for the United States, 'Obamageddon."

PROTESTS!!!

















RIOTS!!!















REBELLIONS!!!














GENERAL STRIKES!!!

















BOSSNAPPINGS!!!

















This is the way the world ends in Right-Wing loonie-land. Unless everyone sits meekly in their proper place and doesn't backtalk the streets shall flow with blood. And now that there's a niggrah in the White House there's no hope for keeping anyone in their place.

According to Celente, the road to Obamageddon shall be paved with economic mismanagement.

"Never before has so much phantom money been printed out of thin air, backed by nothing, producing practically nothing,"

Actually, money has been backed by nothing ever since we moved off of the gold standard. The American dollar is worth what we imagine it is worth, as opposed to the good old days when it was worth what we imagined a pretty yellow rock to be worth.

"drive around Detroit. Look at all the blown out houses and empty neighborhoods. Look at the violence that's increasing. … Look at the types of heinous crimes being committed by people – some blowing their whole families away…"

The violence is not actually increasing. But of course Celente is addresing an audience that belives the crimerate has been skyrocketing every year since 1921. So that today there is no one under the age of fifty who has not committed at least six murders.

There are indeed some towns in the country that are beginning to look something like Detroit and other moribund areas of the Rust Belt. They are the exurbs, the gated communities, the places where development was based on nothing but itself. The communities that were backed by nothing and produced practically nothing. It's most telling that in right-wing loonie land the closing of a shopping mall is considered just as apocalyptic as a food riot. Half of me believes that the "ghost malls" line betrays Celentes whole spiel as a satirical hoax.

When the Ghost Malls come to your bedroom community (and they will) gather your family and ammunition and head for the wilderness immediatly. Be sure to keep a six-month supply of bath oils and lawn care equipment availible at all times and whatever you do DO NOT GO DOWNTOWN UNDER ANY CIRCUMSTANCES!! We have it on good authority that the Ghost Malls are in fact a clever ruse to draw desperate shoppers into the inner city and straight into the merciless teeth of; The Homeless Uprising.

Spoil Them Or Don't, Brats are Brats

There is a small but significant segment of the population who belives that this...


is the landscape that the typical American lives in, and that this...



is what the typical modern American looks like.

I've mentioned before Bob Altemeyer's observation in his "The Authoritarians" how right-wing-authoritarians are obsessed with believing that there is a universal standard for normality and that they are it. While there is certainly arrogance, self-rightousness, and feelings of entitlement on the left, I think it is the far Right's tendency to believe that it is not just normal but normalcy (along with being far more likely to see cocksureness as morally good) that leaves conservatism decidedly more prone to hubris than liberalism. Remember the crows of 'liberalism is dead' earlier this decade when the GOP was sweeping the country with 51-49 victories. Remember when Karl Rove had 'The Math' just before the 2006 backlash. The rise of the Reagan coalition led to thirty years of rightist bragging about their coming 'permanent majority' but the fact of the matter is that they already had a semi-permenent majority who's time has now passed. The defection of southern Democrats by all rights should have been fatal to the party. Instead it was always at worst a significant minority. While it's true that the GOP, enjoyed a general run of success in getting its candidates into the White House, a predictible pattern of overreach, from Watergate to Social Security 'reform' to Gingrich being Gingrich always kept them from the long unbroken hold on power they always just knew was right around the corner.

But while it was the hubris of Republican leaders who brought the party down, it is the fantastically delusional and sad arrogance of 'The Base' at the pattern that seems to be keeping the party down. American Rednecks; who bolted the Democrats en masse when the donkeys broke their agreement to keep the niggers down, can now claim to have been the ruin of both major American parties. GOP victories in the early part of this decade had the camo ballcap crowd riding pretty high, and after Bush's reelection in 2004 there was real hope of never having to see some uppity dyke in a nosering or hearing some pinhead on the teevee say that they should buy one of those faggy little cars ever again. The clucking editorial tone of the "North Platte Telegraph" tells you everything you needed to know about red America's attitude in those days. Everyone knew that the sane, reasonible, salt-of-the-earth people voted Republican, and the fact that the GOP won was proof that it was the home of the sane, reasonible, and salt-of-the-earth. The urban elitists would stew in their coffee shops and deservedly suffer through structural rot while the real Americans enjoyed their tax cuts and cheered as their invincible masculine force expressed itself through military conquest.

But these military conquests went increasingly sour; and Huuricane Katrina revealed the fact that manly assurance in emergencies is not the same thing as knowing what to do in them, and so suburban moderates inevitebly became fed-up with incompetant right-wing government, and Rural White America was suddenly left without the dispropoertinate social influence it feels divinely entitled to. Understand though that the "Real America" crowd will absolutely never stop feeling entitled to rule everyone else. It's entire self-image and sense of self-worth is premised upon being the eternal universal norm. The hunter who feels that hunting is the only way his sons can learn the indispensible truth of man's mastery over nature can never understand a world in which perfectly conservative businessmen eat arugula because, they just don't like grilled meat that much. The retiree who is sincerely bothered by having to press 1 for English cannot conceieve of an America where walking one's dog past storefronts in four languages is banal. The very free market that right-wingers revere as a divine arbiter of moral justice has produced a nation that is decidedly urban and multithnic. It is a world where the White rural conservative is not the embodiment of sanity and salt-of-the-earthiness but rather an emberassment to everyone else. This cannot possibly be. Multiculturalism is not the natural byproduct of economic and technological development but rather a dark conspiracy among scholarly elites. The urban centers that so many Great Fathers lose their children to are not the proud centers of civilization that most people have considered their cities to be but rather unspeakibly evil hell holes full of violence and vice. A sense of superiority is the universal human addiction, and for the man who believes himself superior, equality is as unthinkible as slavery. If a person's sense of entitlement is threatened than the already-powerful human capacity for delusion will go into overdrive in order to protect it. The American good-old-boy would rather believe the most insane nonsesnse rather than accept that he is the weirdo in modern society, and so he does.

That's why right-wing rhetoric since 2006 and especially 2008 is based so heavily on agrievement, (The liberal media, the supposed enviromental hypocrisy of Al Gore and Hollywood celebrities, the War on Christmas) and usurption (President Obama is a Kenyan Muslim. The way that certain 'ACORN' employees lookes the other way at a 'pimp's' shenanagins is proof that they tampered with the election, well somehow damnit. President Obama is a Communist Nazi. Illegal immigrants plan to establish Aztlan. Black dance troupes are planning their savage vengence against us all.)

What makes the delusion worse is the bullies need to believe that he is operating from a position of strength. At the top you have the Bill Kristol's and Karl Roves of the world, who, despite being exposed as and played for fools countless times in the past three years, still imagine themselves to political genuises with the ability to frame national debate in their favor. At the bottom of course are the rural whites who imagine themselves to be the country's eternal essense. And in between the two are the Limbaughs and the Hannities and the Becks linking the mud flap and country club classes together in one big naked esctatic whirl of fantasy.

Right-wing media knuckleheads may have the power to turn their fans out for tea-party rage orgies but, as the Times' David Brooks has pointed out, their actual political power is and has been grossly overrated. Limbaugh and company failed to prevent the nomination of the "moderate" John McCain, failed to turn the close primary fight between Clinton and Obama into a crippling blow for the winner, failed to make Peoria moderates see Sarah Palin as anything but the lunatic she is and finally of course failed to preven the election of The Other.

But of course the epilepsy cases of AM radio are more popular with their fans than ever before. The ditto-chamber provides a cacoon from a social reality that cannot possibly be. Here in the reality of hippy-socialise freaks, reaching out to moderates would seem to be the obvious way for the GOP to recover from recent losses, just as reaching out to moderates is the obvious strategy for any minority party anywhere. In Limbaughland it is exactly the appeal the moderates that has purged the real majority from power. Here there are millions of phantom patriots who stayed home on election day out of disgust towards McCains insufficient hatred of brown people. In Limbaughland the tea-party tantrums are a better measure of ideological strength than elections. In Limbaughland the thirteen million citizens of Limbaughland are an invincible arm ready to overwhelm a nation of 300 million. In Limbaughland it matters not that the thirteen million number has remained static for twenty years as the country has grown significantly larger in all areas except the hinterlands where Limbaughlanders hail from.

And the Rove's and the Kristol's who can't and the GOP members of Congress, who can't imagine themselves as anything but shapers of opinion, as anything but manipulative masters of imperial fate, hear this mouse in the megaphone and feel assured that they are still Lords.

And so the Republican party will continue to overplay its hand as it did when in power. Any public disontent towards the president will be interpreted as a massive popular rejection of him. Any temporary advantage gained by Democratic timidity will be pissed away by grandiose bluster that reminds the general public of what assholes these people still are. Hubris cannot possibly be unlearned by the mind that considers hubris a virtue, and conservative confidence that we will always be living in 1994 will likely asure that 1994 will not happen again.

Blackmailing David Leterman.

http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2009/10/01/david-letterman-extortion_n_307221.html

Remember kids, moral reputations are not very important to comedians, certainly not worth two million dollars. If you're thinking about blackmailing a comedian, writer, or musician, you'd be better off just robbing a bank.

And I shouldn't have to tell you that if you're doing any sort of illegal business by check you might as well just lock yourself up now.

Surely I'm the Only English Major to Bitch About Banned Books

It's Banned Books Week, and this year's winner for most banned book in America is "And Tango Makes Three", the story of homo penguins Roy and Silo and their adoption of a chick whose natural parents were unable to care for more than one child at a time.

As with anything involving gayness, the gay penguin book has inspired all of the tired claptrap about "promoting the homosexual agenda" and "undermining Christian values," and I must say that when I read the book to my baby cousin, the part where Roy and Silo pop Amyl, grind to Kylie Mynogue at a Village club, and felate total strangers in the bathroom was a little off-putting. Mostly though the asshole segment of the American population is bothered by the book because of how it puts the lie to the old "homosexuality is unnatural" canard. The truth of course is that gayness is utterly rampant in the animal kingdom, and it takes a great deal of willful blindness to not notice. Sure you can chalk up your two hunting dogs having at each other to some sort of prison sex thing; but then come along these gay penguins right there in New York, and then along comes some fucker who writes a book about them, and the perfect naturalness of anumal gayness becomes almost impossible to ignore.

Well that's what you get motherfuckers. I loath homophobia, and more than that I trully dispise citing the naturalness or unaturalness of a thing as proof that is just and good or not. Nature is the incarnation of nihilism and anarchism. Our precious instincts are nothing but electric needles prodding us to become decaying vehicles for self-perpepetuating chemical mechinations that are wholly indifferent to us; wholly devoid of meaning or value. There is no circle of life. There is no Gaia system uniting all biological existense into some damned cosmic Kumbaya. But I digress.

Any man who raised in the Midwest has no chance of getting through boyhood without some shithead giving him the plug-and-socket metaphor. The correlation between homophobia and strong religious belief is based largely on the notion that the "perfect fit" between penis and vagina is the ultimate proof of an interventionalist God. A God who personally dictates the laws of society, determines what our social and gender roles shall be, what our desires shall be, makes sure our socks match in the morning, etc.

They have it precisely backwards. The reproductive process for placental mammals is indeed quite impressive, almost like clockwork though not quite. Mistakes still happen, and it wasn't until humans invented the abortion clinic that mothers had a more of disposing their dead and unwanted that was more appealing than eating them. At any rate placentals are the exception. Sex among the lower animals is a smorgasboard of methods that are by turns wasteful, needlessly dangerous, and frequently hilarious.

There's a lot of cloaca rubbing. The cloaca is the all-purpose rear oriface possessed by most birds and reptiles, male and female. Reproduction among birds involves a method known as the "cloacal kiss." Male and female back up to each other, line up holes, and then it's basically a game of ball-and-cup. Gay birds? They do it exactly the same way. What else are they going to do? It's hard to imagine why even bible-thumpers would be bothered by same-sex relationships among creatures who all carry the same junk. All bird sex is essentially lesbian sex. If you're worried about strange sexuality shattering your delusions of an orderly universe, than never mind gay penguins, worry about the coalca. Turn your extended family into a cult and picket Thanksgiving dinners.

http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/americas/8284509.stm
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Homosexuality_in_animals
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Roy_and_Silo
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cloaca

Learning From Mistakes is For Pussies

"In Colorado, a state where Palin campaigned hard last year on behalf of the Republican ticket but which Sen. John McCain (R-Ariz.) eventually lost to Barack Obama, Arapahoe County Republican Party Chairman David Kerber said that Palin was a good fit with Western sensibilities.


“She comes across as someone who’s going to say what she says and if you don’t like it, that’s just too bad,” Kerber said. “She’s not going to lie, she’s not going to sugarcoat it — she’s just going to let it rip. I think that’s what Westerners want.”

Read more: http://www.politico.com/news/stories/0809/26236.html#ixzz0SY0dLlQ4

While that's certainly unPC and ubermacho of Ms. Palin, Mr. Kerber, the career success of a politician is specifically determined by how much people like what he/she has to say. If they don't like it then it's too bad for the politician, not for the people, especially when it comes to keeping power out of the hands of Tracy Flick. So if you were wondering why the McCain/Palin ticket lost Colorado, and Nevada, and Virginia, and North Carolina...

By the way, however much you may imagine the thoroughly suburbanized deniziens of Arapahoe County to be self-reliant frontiersmen, the fact remains that the American West has a higher percentage of its people living in cities than any other part of the country. So if you want to know where "Western sensibilities" lie try looking at the bus-riding collectivists of Denver and Alburqurque. Feel free to hold your nose if you must.

Life Is Good.

Dallas Cowboys, Nazis of the American sporting world, playing in front of an all-time NFL record crowd, pregame celebration of all things football and Texas and alpha male, George W. Bush in attendance, 33-31 losers. This coming after the Italian Fascist of American sport, the New England Patriots, get torn to pieces by a Jets team they had come to consider a slave race. To be alive in this age is to see humanity in the full glory of all that is free and good.

I think the Bears won this weekend as well, and I might have had sex at some point in the past two days, but I don't remember unimportant things.

The Breeze Here is Starting to Get A Little Cooler at Night

I think I'll wonder south for awhile. Maybe hit up the Northeast in the spring, and maybe I'll stick around in a place where I can get paid to be a psuedobohemian bore. I'm not 30 yet and I can still taste the new for what it is. So yeah. I do believe I will.

So...

That Joe Wilson post I did a few days ago, about right-wingers penchant for inventing truth in order to maintain their delusion of being normal folk. Well, a much better example of that has just come up.





"In the competitive world of Washington protests, crowd size is often a matter of dispute. Organizers usually boast of huge crowds, while police and the news media offer much smaller estimates.

So supporters of Saturday’s “tea party” protests against President Barack Obama were quick to highlight their big turnout. To bolster countless claims on blogs and Facebook, many posted a photograph that showed a gargantuan crowd sprawling from Capitol Hill down the National Mall to the Washington Monument.

But it turns out the photo is more than 10 years old, apparently taken during a 1997 Promise Keepers rally." politifact.com

This is easily the most pathetic thing I have come across in my life. The lengths that rednecks will go to in order to avoid accepting that they are the unamerican radicals. Disgusting.

You Dumb Motherfuckers

So, God told you that this was worth killing and dying for huh? Hell of a joker that guy. http://www.nytimes.com/2009/09/14/world/middleeast/14settlers.html?_r=1&ref=todayspaper

Forgive the Internet Speak: But This!!!

This!!, with a dash of no shit Sherlock.

"A common meme on the left is that racism is driving the hatred of Obama. I think the root is deeper and scarier: it is shadow projection.

Our ego wants to believe we are wonderful, and so cannot tolerate evidence to the Obama-joker contrary. Consider America. As good as we are, we have a dark side and our actions often have dark consequences. We are large and cast a large shadow. If we were a more mature people we would simply own our dark side, integrate it into part of our self knowledge, and act accordingly. However American mythology says that we are the good country, and to maintain that the pure version of that belief, we are willfully ignorant of our faults. In the minds of many “patriotic” Americans, we have no dark side. Unwilling to own our dark side, we project our shadow onto others.

The Cold War gave us a long period as “the good country” as the Soviet Union gave us a steady (and objectively evil) force onto which we could project our shadow. After the fall of communism we finally found Saddam Hussein to play that role, which clouded our perceptions of the real Saddam (and again, he was objectively evil). Since the Iraq war we’ve looked for a new target onto which to project our shadow. Perennial candidates China, North Korea, and Iran don’t quite suit our needs, and “the terrorists” finally wore thin. I have wondered who our next victim would be. Now we know."

Poster on "The Daily Dish, 09/14/09:

When I was very small my very conservative father told me that he though my grandmother's Thanksgiving dinner was the best in the world because it was my grandmother's and that my mother's breakfast was the best in the world because it was my mother's, and furthermore this is what it meant to love something. He is on record then in his belief that to love a person or thing is necessarily to consider her or it to be the best in all things. The thought of love and pride being independent of each other is inconceivable. (Remember the flap over Mdm. Obama's 'proud of my country for the first time' comment.) Rather it is love and scrutiny that can not possibly exist in the same mind. (Just try to forget the mountain of 'why do you hate America' crap after 9/11)

In the absence of a quasi-divine monarch on which to project everything we like about ourselves we have instead deified the lifestyle of the White small-towners and suburbanites who have historically been our ruling class. Consider now what social conditions pose the biggest threat to the regal myth of "Real America"...
1. Inequities in education,income, and health care caused largely by historical racial oppression.
2. Wasted resources and environmental degradation caused by suburban sprawl,

... and you go a long way towards explaining why American hostility towards liberals is so intense. The Right's hatred of 'big government', its often paranoid suspicion of state-directed reform, is based largely on the fact that to acknowledge that the state has a legitimate role to play in society is to acknowledge that society is human, requires conscious direction, does not maintain equilibrium by itself as does an atomic clock.

* Of course, there is one famous exception to the right's belief that government has no legitimate role to play in society. It is perfectly eager to use the State as a totem of patriarchal authority. This is why many right-wingers who proclaim the fiercest hatred of 'big government' will tolerate no criticism of military of police power, which are indisputably the twin engines of tyranny for any state that chooses to be tyrannical.

If you wonder how reasonably intelligent people can believe patent nonsense; such as Al Gore leading the entire scientific world in a Marxo/environmental scam, it is for the same reason that reasonably intelligent people pray to a sadomasochistic zombie. They do not consider their obligation to American society to be based on voluntary agreement to a social contract. America, and the White middle-class rural/suburban lifestyle that is supposedly the essence of America, is a thing beyond scrutiny, it is a thing they must believe in. Their worthiness as persons, as well as yours and mine, is utterly dependent on adhering to this belief through all storms.

You Lie Because I Say So Is Why

"He voted for that bill without even reading it!!" is a line that's been used by both parties when in the Congressional minority, and it is a canard. Congresspeople are busy, and the bills they vote on are fucking long. If you were in their position, I can assure you that you wouldn't read any more than was neccesary to get the jist.

Or maybe not. Congressman Joe Wilson, Republican from South Carolina, has become instantly famous by apparantly ubermenshing controversial tenants of health care reform into being by sheer will. Wilson publically called President Obama a liar during the joint-session speech last night when Obama said that illegal immigrants would not be receiving government health care under any proposal. The always quick-witted president managed to avoid an awkward situation by using his backwards Communazimuslim Lizardman language to sieze control of Wilson's mind and illicit an apology within an hour.

I'm not terribly concerned about proper decorum in the halls of government, in fact I lust for the day when Congress busts out into a Japanese-Diet style brawl. And like I said before, Congresspeople do not have the time to read entire bills cover-to-cover and should not be expected to do so. Still there is nothing stopping Joe Wilson from perusing the health care bills himself if he's afraid that there's anything in them that is insufficient in regards to keeping out the spi..../ upholding immigration law.

I've mentioned before that Orwell's fear that a authoritarian regime with "memory hole" power would have the ability to maintain its tyranny forever turned out to be blessedly backwards. What happens is that dictorial systems gradually fall under the delusion that they can invent truth, and in so doing they become unable to respond to threats they imagine themselves able to wish away. The Rupublican Party was never quite tyrannical during the Bush years, which makes the fact that very obvious fact that they fell very hard to this delusion all the more pathetic.

In 2005 it was deeply irritating to hear a hair's breadth majority party chastise us liberals for being "out of the mainstream". To hear a party now firmly in the minority lecture us in precisely the same way in 2009 is baffling and sad. Staid suburbanites and post-modern hipsters are now united in viewing the American right wing as the batshit uncle emberassing us before the world, yet the right-winger still considers the other ninety nne percent of Planet Earth to be the weirdos.

What we are seeing within the American Right today is not the sort of imperial God complex that brought down Moscow and the Third Reich, but rather the populist God complex chronicled in Bob Altemeyer's "The Authoritarians." Altemeyer observed that one of the biggest motivators of the 'right-wing authoritarian' mindset is a fierce desire to beleive that there is a universal standard for normality and that they are it. (In philisophical jargon, the right-wing authoritarian considers himself 'subject.')

When the right-winger combines this adolescent need to be normal with good old- fashioned chauvanism,(the worship of power and force, purely masculine of course, as the solution to all ills) he becomes endowed with the ability to bend reality as much as is neccesary to maintain his sense of being subject, center of and rightful master of the universe. The old buggaboo of 'liberal media bias' is the tool by which he bends reality. If the authoritarian's sense of being normal is upset by hearing the liberal media say that black is black, than black is white, the president is a secret Muslim terrorist, Naziism is a form of Socialism, and the State will force you to feed your grandparents to illegal immigrants.

So finally, if President Other dares to deny something that provides the right-wing authoritarian with moral license to hate him, such as making the objectively falsifiable claim that there is nothing benifitting illegal immigrqants in his health care proposals, than the shout of "you lie" delivered with certainty, passion, and perfect thoughtlessness, is enough to make this inconveinent fact disapear, and the world again rotates on the axis of the self where it belongs.

Riley is Doing Well

I saw the hobbled ex-ultimate fighter at 2:00 AM on Monday night, driving the new Saturn that his new sugar mama lets him borrow. Or at least he says she lets him borrow it, he gets very defensive when pressed for details. The woman in question is apperantly a 49-year old lawyer from Schaumburg who he met at an Einstien Bros. Bagel shop downtown, a middle-aged woman who found herself single and alone before she knew it. Riley mocks her apperence and attempts to give "bootleg cab rides" to twentysomething women in her car. Truely a rat fuck excuse for a man, so naturally I got in the car when he asked me to.

He asked me if I had any money and I said know. He had completely blown the two hundred dollars the woman gave him burning gasoline accross the city and snorting cocaine off of the counsol. Now he didn't have enough gas to get back to the lovenest in the suburbs. He was completely broke until he sold the Lakeview neighborhood crackhead a baggie full of spat sunflower seeds for five dollars. He called her a stupid bitch when he found that she had given him only three dollars and change.

"That bitch is a crackhead. I mean, I do it every now and then, but there's getting high recreationally and there's being a fucking crackhead. That bitch is a fucking crackhead you know what I'm saying?"

A gay admirer of his on the Halstead strip gave him three dollars and a joint for both of us in return for the info that the police were planning to raid his favorite club. (Hydrate, if you must know, and you shouldn't bring your pharmacy with you if you're going out anyway. Watch yourselves out there fellas.) The look on Riley's face as he held up his six dollar bills before me was the most sincerely prideful countenance I had seen since my preschool graduation.

"I come up quick don't I?" It was impressive in its own way, the way he badgered the gay man into handing over that second joint, the way he held up traffic to hit on a girl walking down Halstead in the hope she would be impressed by somebody else's car, the way he used my phone to call a stolen-goods fencer at three in the morning after picking up a friend named Baeu with a Boliva watch. (The fencer tried to call me back at eight that morning as I was sleeping.) In pop culture the mythical man without a soul is usually some sort of ultra-theatric serial killer. The reality of living without a sould is much more banal than that. Terribly pathetic and yet, somehow grander than any Hannibal Lector nonsense. Godspeed you shameless asshole.

There's This Neighbor Girl

She still lives with her parents at the opposite end of my mom and dad's block. 25 now, has a boyfriend with a husker ballcap and a trimmed goatee. She's already carrying a paunch, already keeps her hair in a ponytail and wearing t-shirts with the name of car companies on them with grey sweatpants. She seems confident in keeping the boy.

I've been eating a lot here, naturally enough. I said something to my mom about being nearly thirty and not having a gut yet. Dad said yeah but there was such a thing as starving to death to.

That's lovely. My father thinks that having a gut hang out over ther rest of the body is not only perfectly healthy but the standard norm for male health.

Every man to a man with the Husker cap (sometimes red, sometimes camo)oakley sunglasses, and the closely shaved beard/goat combo.

I Really Was Expecting Ted Kennedy to Make 150

As a white Catholic three generations removed from the days when the subdivisions among white people meant something, I had some trouble shaking the urge to refer to the Kennedy brothers collectively as "our Obama." But in spite of the genetic penchant we "White ethnics" have for negative romance; melodrama, martyrdom, and general caterwauling, I have to accept that it just doesn't fit, at all. It goes without saying that anti-Catholic bigotry in the U.S., while real, is small fish compared to what Blacks and Native Americans have suffered through. Mainly though the "our Obama" phrase is just 'USA Today'-headline level stupid. I've been sleeping in irregular two-hour snatches lately and that's the only excuse I have for even thinking it up.

Still I pour my 40 for Ted Kennedy. I pour it with pride and without qualification. The little brothers contributions to civil rights, workers rights, health care, and education have indisputably left the country better off than it would have been without him. There have been times when Kennedy was almost single-handidly keeping the federal government functioning as something more than a Monopoly money factory for the Pentagon. In those days when the State was in the hands of those who viewed government as a necessary evil, existing chiefly so that the people would have some form of central authority to worship, Ted Kennedy did what he could to make government actually do its damned job.

Yes I know about Chappaquiddick, and so does everyone else. Yes I know that baby brother Kennedy was able to get away with an epic amount of shit for being a Kennedy, so does everyone else. Still Ted Kennedy is slightly more admired than reviled, and rightly so.

This is not now and never has been a liberal media conspiracy to downplay Chappaquiddick, Chappaquiddick is loud and clear, and it was unforgivable. There are those who demand that Ted Kennedy be known for Chappaquiddick and only Chappaquiddick, who would accuse me and anyone else who admires the man for being amoral partisan hacks or mindless Kennedy-oglers in considering anything but Chappaquiddick in judging the man. Sorry but no, In spite of self-help slogans to the contary life is not defined by any individual moment; neither the bright shining kind nor the dark and despicable kind. Life is the summation of moments, choices, and actions. Ted Kennedy caused a great deal of pain and suffering in his personal life, the good he has done for the country outweighs that.

In the second half of the twentieth century, the idea that government should help people gradually came to be seen as a radical one. The sorry fact is that a family of spoiled vagiholic monarchists gave the concept of activist government the celebrity appeal it needed to stay viable during the long post-civil rights-era Thermidor. The fact that we needed these rakes is our fault, not theirs. What would you do if you had society at your feet like they did? And hell, I know I'm not alone in finding it very hard not to like these guys. Have you ever worked in a bar as a teenager, and have some pie-eyed banker or lawyer start telling you about the time he did acid with a bunch of Mexicans and ask you what it's like to be fuck the sixteen-year-old waitress with a rose tattoo on her ankle? The Kennedy's are like that. While the Bushes drink their near-beer, produce barely enough children to replace themselves, and refuse themselves any attempt at emotional release outside of their Abercrombiefied excuse for churches, the Kennedy's do aristocracy as its meant to be done; baroque, decadent, obscene insatiable, Catholic. Tonight the sons of Joseph are abusing barmaids together in eternity.

Who The Fuck is Bob Collier?

Collier, the man featured in a front page article in tuesday's New York Times, is someone who has "built himself a quiet life of family and church (and hunting and fishing) in his rural hometown in southwest Georgia." Collier and his wife Susan are both ardent conservatives, "They receive much of their information from Fox News, Rush Limbaugh's radio program, and Matt Drudge*'s web site." but Bob has apparently never been especially politically active. He skipped the antiwar protests of his college years. It was not until the looming specter of health care reform raised its menacing head that Mr. Collier summoned the courage to drive a whole hour to Albany, Ga,(The market town for his region and so presumably a trip he makes quite frequently)to speak out against the plan to his congressman, Sanford D. Bishop**

* Drudge? Seriously? That's old school as fuck. I wonder if they still have Hotmail like I do.
** Sanford D. Bishop dares you to deliver a shipment of Coors in twenty eight hours.

So, that's who Bob Collier is. But we still left with the question of who the fuck Bob Collier is and why he's on the front page of the New York Times. I freely admit to being a little jealous of the man. I hope that my jealousy doesn't cloud my assessment of the man, but I am jealous, and there's no reason why I shouldn't be. I'm some guy. I have opinions on things. Some things make me happy and some things make me sad. Some things make me angry and some things make me glad. In making front page news out of what Bob Collier thinks of health care reform the Times has officially declared that anyone with a brain that responds to external stimuli has every right to expect the same treatment.

They were looking for an everyman's opinion, that was the hook, and of course in looking for an everyman they theoretically could have ended up featuring any man. But of course not just anyone can be anyone. In the age of a Black urban president, with the river of human settlement flowing from country to city just as it always has, no less of a publication than the secular/Marxist/liberal/traitor/ New York Times still considers the standard of American normality to be the conservative rural White guy.

Collier, for his part, is perfectly convinced that his position on reform is suitably Olympian for the Times. "This is about the future of our country as we know it, and may mean the end or our country as we know it." His lack of lifelong political activism is presented by the Times as somehow legitimizing. "The cameras may linger on those at the extremes, but it is the parade of respectful questioners, those expressing discomforting fears and legitimate concerns, that may ultimately have more impact."

It is of course a good and fine thing to speak respectfully. But just as the level of passion one has for ones' opinion does not determine its truth, so the tone of ones' voice in expressing a concern does not make it legitimate. A vagrant once spoke to me with perfect serenity about his plan to join the army and become a suicide bomber for the US government. Which isn't to say that Collier is a raving loon. He seems like a decent man, and compared to the town-haller who accused a Jew of being a Nazi he seems downright admirable.

The fact is that the health care reform now on the table does not call for any more government in the market than any other social policy proposal put forth by a Democratic government since the New Deal. (In fact a good deal less than what would have been boilerplate thirty years ago.) If you think that's still too much, fine. But if you honestly believe that the health care industry, with its tow-truck style captive customer base, is the virgin pillar of Capitalism, and that to sully it in the slightest way would bring the whole structure down, well that's just nutty, in whatever tone of voice. It betrays a strong-father complex that can allow itself to relate to the larger society only as protective ubermensch, never allowing itself to accept its dependence upon the larger society, the innate vulnerability of being a mortal creature.

It is, to put it another way, an aristocratic complex. To the very end the nobility of Europe clung to the belief that they were the essence of their nations, never mind that the serfs had long moved away and that the general public was becoming as well or better educated than they. They were the standard of normality for reasons that lay beyond physical reality. The history of American stupidity is largely one of rural White men who have been suckered into believing that they are aristocracy. A strong-father complex is understandable in a man who has gone through life on a diet of Fox, Limbaugh, and Drudge, telling him that he and all other great defenders like him are under siege from those who seek to take away their unchanging national essence that exists beyond the realm of physical reality.

And now this poisonous old myth is repeated again by, the New York Times?