Friday, May 23, 2014

It's Christmas in Conyers

So I haven't posted in a while. My old dog, Harley, got gradually more impaired and finally died. I can't talk about it.

But I can talk about the Republicans. I've been busy there just trying to keep tabs on the range and intensity of the bad thinking. And evil-doing. It's a job in itself. And I already have a job. But when principle is held hostage to politics, and policy to privilege, the quantity of bad stuff that can happen is more than you can keep up with. 

They don't do bad shit they ARE bad shit. That's what I'm saying. So the evil-doing is effortless. It flows from them unconsciously and without conspiracy or contrivance. They don't need to contrive anything. They live inside of it, a world of unease, mistrust and suspicion. Restlessness rooted in fear.

There's no such thing as principle in their world. No right or wrong. Just the elemental drives of greed and lust for power and lust. As in SEX, on that last one. Some primordial version of lust, anyway. Primordial and generalized and inchoate and all enmeshed with fear. 

A similarly primordial fear. Rising in the depths of their brains like swamp gas. And, man, they must all have some horrible mental version of indigestion. To be so mean. So pessimistic, fatalistic and ornery.

There's the final frontier, the scene of the deciding battle, this imagined world of threats. A drama unconnected to reality. They latch onto all this stuff they're defending. Lately the Constitution is a biggie. Religion is always a biggie. Delusional, of course, but that's their world. 

A fabricated home for their fears. Some fucking board game they've created. OLIGOPOLY, maybe. Whatever. How they must miss the cold war and the commies. They don't know how to live in a world without enemies. So they invent them.

The Constitution needs defending indeed. Now that they're on the scene. From them. And Christianity. Waterboarders for Jesus. Great idea, guys. Karl Rove cook that one up? Oh, no. It probably came from the CheneyFeld MasterMind. The over-soul of their Reich. 

Their cloud-server thing. The shared consciousness of their movement. A repository of fear. Justifications for fear. With Ann Coulter there keeping an eye on the place in a little cocktail-waitress dress. The sane only go there to see what they're up against. And with a cyanide pill. In case they get stuck.

Here they are, those Republicans, living in what is probably the best place ever at the best time ever, E PLURIBUS UNUM, and they're chronically scared shitless. And so always on the attack. 

A political philosophy that propagates itself like rabies. You bite people and they get it, the disease. Everybody dies in the end. What fun! I wish they would keep their death wish to themselves. 

So they're an army of Don Quixotes. And Sanchos. Living their delusions. Strange how honor cultures are the most dishonorable places imaginable. Quixote was funny and pathetic. And old and incompetent. The Republicans are competent. And not funny. 

Unless you think it's funny to have crazy people attacking you. Thay're damn good at what they do, the Wrecking Crew. So when they lower their lance at you, or cradle their spear or whatever, I suggest you run. They'll skewer your ass. To save the Constitution and Christianity. 

There's one place above all where the Republicans, led by the Southern White Boys, won't tolerate fair competition. From the black guys, especially. SEX. The White Women. You know what they say about the black guys. 

The Republicans know they're losers on this front. So they limit the competition. Protect their mojo. What mojo they have. Money mojo. Gun mojo. 

The White Boy Republicans all need deep analysis on this one. Freudian. Maybe the Twelve Steps. Or Christianity. No, they already think they're Christian. But they're running away from something that's strapped to their ass. 

They empower it themselves, the fear. And they make it real, create it, by believing in it so strongly. They attack the imagined enemy and those folks defend themselves thereby reassuring the attackers that they were right in the first place. Makes me feel dizzy. 

Anyway let's just stipulate that they're good at it, the evil-doing. Watch that movie on Lee Atwater, BOOGIE MAN. And the Bill Moyers thing on Jack "The Hack" Abramoff. It's all there. The Moyers piece begins with an interview of Thomas Frank.

The latest in my series, REPUBLICAN REMAKES OF AMERICAN CLASSIC MOVIES, is WHITE CHRISTMAS. There's a chorus of Southern White Boys. They sing the song WHITE CHRISTMAS a lot. 

There's a huge painted eye on a backdrop behind them. It blinks twice quickly every time they sing the word "white" in the song. The last time they sing it, in the denouement, they appear in white robes. It's the only song they sing. 

Fear causes people to cut a deep groove. NASCAR deep. See my post on that. You dig yourself a hole. Build a wall. Limit everything. For protection. From the imagined enemy. You need certainty. And simplicity. Literalism. 

Your world is already so unstable you can't tolerate any additional uncertainty. So you retreat. From reality. And attack your imagined enemies.  Ultimately you retreat from life. Because life is fear. Life equals fear. You crave death, in a way. The Apocalypse. 

But it's strapped to your ass so in the hole it goes with you. The fear. Right there with you. Unconscious. Subliminal. I don't think "strapped to your ass" is the technical Freudian term, but it conveys the point. You dig deeper. A deeper hole. 

You try to unload the fear. Find a home for it. A focus. It's the Commies. The Liberals. Government. The Secularists. Muslims. The Relatives. I mean Relativists. Whatever. It doesn't matter. You even unload it on the people in the hole with you. You turn on them.

Or, since the destruction you crave seems to be on its own schedule, in spite of your efforts, a gated community might do as a good place to await the Second Coming. Closest thing to a fort, on the residential front. 

A virtual gated community if you can't afford a real one. Keep the riffraff out. Your fellow citizens, that is. Especially the black ones. Oh, right, they're already fenced off. In jail. 

So back to the movie. We're in a getaway now, a lodge of some sort, at Stone Mountain some distance from Conyers, Georgia. The crowd is all from Conyers. From the gated communities. 

They're there at Christmas-time to practice a play, RUSHBO AND THE NIGHT VISITOR, which will be presented at the country club back in Conyers as part of the Christmas pageant. Right after the Nativist Play. Nativity, that is. No matter. 

In RUSHBO a black guy with dreadlocks knocks on a door in an exclusive white neighborhood in search of food and shelter, or some free shit, no doubt. It's the home of Rushbo O'Reilly and his wife Fannie. 

Rushbo blows the guy to tatters with the handy twelve gauge. Both barrels. Little hair things all over the yard. Dreads. The neighborhood kids take them as souvenirs.

Rushbo had no reason to think the guy was a threat but best to be safe. It was dark out. And a darkie, out there, in the dark. Who wouldn't be concerned. He looked kind of scary. 

In silhouette. That's about all Rushbo could see. BEST TO BE SAFE. DEFEND THE RIGHTS. STAND YOUR GROUND. He was in his own home. At worst he was inhospitable.

The commies try Rushbo for exercising his rights. The black guy might have had head lice and who knows what else, argues Rushbo's super-expensive attorney, Randy Rankin. The spectators all run home to burn their kids' souvenirs.

Rushbo is acquitted and all is well. The Conyers crowd is feeling all warm, fuzzy and optimistic.

But there's another visitor to Rushbo's home, the health nurse. There's been a nasty outbreak of venereal disease in Conyers, and Rushbo's daughter, Lulu Belle, is thought to be infected. She is, in fact, and she's pregnant as well. By the black guy Rushbo blew to bits. 

Must be why he came knocking, dreads and all. Gave her a baby. And VD. He was the vector. Rushbo doesn't know the word but he doesn't like the sound of it. Typical black, commie, liberal, secular shit. Fucking vectors.

The health nurse schedules a meeting in the gym at Stonewall High School. It's really a presentation by her trying to get through to the parents. Their kids are screwing up a storm. And to get them to get their kids to take the test. The VD test. 

Finally, in frustration, she projects a diagram onto a big screen showing their kids, as nodes, connected to one another by lines representing sexual contact. Now their kids are nodes, thinks Rushbo. Fucking commies. 

Wow. Fucking wow. The air is sucked entirely out of the room, mostly by the moms. The dads think they were born too soon. The visual is unbelievable. You can barely see the background. The black guy, Jesus, RIP, is in the middle, like a huge sun with innumerable rays emanating. 

Emanating on their daughters. He has to be right in the middle or it makes the thing impossible, he was so sexually active. 

The country club crowd realizes at some point that the play they'd commissioned, on the honorable defense of one's home by a noble, fat-ass white man, had been commandeered and corrupted by gay pinko secular yankee scum and turned into a commie mess. 

They been hijacked. As though any such thing could happen in Conyers. In their gated communities. All that illicit sex. And VD. And Jesus. And vectors and nodes. Laughable.

Turns out it was a guy, Pole Corter, working on the thing. Their play. With his partner. And I mean partner. Should have known. Damn art crowd. Jews, Gypsies, Gays, all the worst elements. 

Probably raised on NPR. Got to defund that. Word is, Pole has a big one. For a white guy. God knows what he does with it.

There was a great song, though, in the play, EVERYTHING BLOWS. About declining standards. Hate to lose that. Very catchy. Have to work it into the new play, an old standard, THE MAN OF LA MUNCHA, or something like that. 

Need to check that title. Sounds like a guy who likes to eat pussy. God it's hard to bring up kids these days. So glad it can't happen in Conyers. 

Anyway, the new play is all about chivalry and nobility and ass-kicking. Good stuff. Quixote and Sancho. Great female role, Dulcinea del Tabasco, or something like that. A spicy dish indeed. Like to eat some of.... Oops! 

The play has been brought up to date with a pig-picking at the end. Under the monument at Stone Mountain. A monument honoring some real patriotic Americans. Ass-kickers, too. 

Notwithstanding that they were traitors. Just exercising their rights, really. To nullify. Anything and everything. Like those stupid Yankees who tried to nullify the Fugitive Slave Act. But our guys nullified the right stuff. Like the Constitution. 

The Conyers crowd is so pleased with the new play they decide to have a pickin' under the hallowed monument themselves, at the end of their stay. Oh, man, life is good. Nothing like some 'cue and a cold one. 

But there's a story circulating about a cell call from a health nurse. Something going on back in Conyers. Everyone calls the kids. Everything's fine, say the kids. Just hanging out watching TV. 

Watching some videos. Of course it's good stuff they're watching. Wholesome. Stuff that would pass the Jesus test. And they're having sandwiches. All is well.

So here ends the remake, WHITE CHRISTMAS, with the chorus crooning the song in their moth-eaten Klan robes beneath the great monument at Stone Mountain. Actually, damn, those robes are in great shape. I mean starched and shit. 

Oh, well. Mighty glad we got the Constitution to protect those personal freedoms. For everyone. The rule of law. For everyone. A fair shake. For everyone. Except Jesus, I guess. But that was just a play. Fiction. Commie pinko fiction. 

There WAS another song in the movie. I forgot. It plays with the credits. The white guys singing about the black guys. Struggling with the lyrics. Looking hard at their sheets, confused: "They got rhythm, they got music, they got my gal, who could ask..." 

They do this as though they're learning the song, singing it for the first time. Every time they hit the word "gal" they get all agitated. Who wrote this shit. Some Jew, no doubt. 

That's why they want to get back to the old days. And the old ways. When men was men and niggers was niggers. It's so hard being white. Upholding standards. Oh, well.

http://www.pbs.org/wgbh/pages/frontline/shows/georgia/etc/synopsis.html