Nerf Sword at a Knife Fight

Certainly since the days of Bob Shrum the Democrats have been bringing a nerf sword to a knife fight, and it goes much further back, though seeing Shrum's candidates skewered by Lee Atwater was such a spectacle, American politics at the low ebb at which it remains.   

Atwater got well nerfed and Shrum was left pricked and stunned, but what do we care. Somewhere in there it became clear that the knife side in the fight didn't still believe that we are all on the same team, all Americans and deserving of a voice and the assumption of good will.

The Atwaterites remain ascendent on the Right and the standing insult to Democrats continues, as they run around brandishing their nerf weapons. America struggles and staggers on, in the care of people who are great at winning elections and terrible at everything else. 

Bad Shit

Occasionally I glimpse the deep, inner workings of the soul of a southern white man and know that we are doomed. They say that emotional injuries suffered early enough in life can play out horribly because they aren't objectified and understood as incidents but construed existentially.

Or, in another parlance, archetypally, as manifestations of a world of primal forces of mythological cast, where everything is fraught with sinister import and significance. So a sickness or injury isn't that but an indication that the world is always offering up annihilation, extinction and oblivion.

Slavery is America's early childhood injury. It's the thing that we process archetypally and can't objectify or see for what it is, a massive moral fuck-up but still an incident, a thing that happened, the consequences of which can be addressed rationally and directly rather than by analogy.

The souls of southern white men, driving their brains from the archetypal regions, take them to libertarianism and other laundered versions of the same old racist crap, white male power and privilege, with property being pivotal, as in the distinction between owner and owned, slave and free.

In this analogical, parallel world of hobgoblins and bogeymen and red herrings everything is processed unconsciously and partially, as a means of evasion and avoidance. So the Confederate flag, for example, isn't racist when it is, voting rights aren't diminished when they are and so on.

This is morally corrosive stuff, since it cracks the door to a world of wishful thinking, defensiveness and unreason, a world which is most likely accepted as real because the true source of the fear, being unaddressed, will always find other homes, like an illness propagating itself among hosts.

Hippies

Something has triggered a couple of intense dreams for me lately. The last one, apart from a lot of unrelateable strangeness, had me somehow winding up in a neighborhood of sorts which turned out to be an informal community of hippies and lefties and somewhat disorganized, impractical people.

Do you notice an air of judgement in that? Well, it was there in the dream as well and I got schooled on it, being confronted with my own sense of superiority. We must all have some of this but I am, in fact, pretty judgmental. I have always identified with authority and loved standards and structure. 

I think I'm comfortable with that generally but that, in times of stress or confusion or vulnerability, those deep attributes which define us to some degree can become our enemies, by being too extreme and becoming a way of protecting ourselves by being less free and open in our daily lives. 

By being more compulsive and determined, that is. I have always been an energetic, creative, improvisational person. Can you see it in my writing? I think the love of structure and standards is connected to that, to keep me from flying off into space, kind of, in some sort of semi-ecstatic state. 

Anyway, I recall feeling superior to the free-spirits in that informal community and I think it's just the fear of my own freedom, that I'm more like them than I think. Late in the dream some beautiful young women started dancing loosely in the street, on their way back from shopping or somewhere.

It looked right out of Isadora Duncan. It was beautiful and such a simple expression of everyday joy. "Joy." These words don't serve us well, sometimes. Whatever it was it was essential, like food, in the dream, or more likely inevitable, if someone lives fully inside of their humanity, without fear. 

I doubt I'll move to that community, in my head--it doesn't live anywhere else--but I'll take my practical self there and befriend them, maybe helping them build something, and they will admire me for my practicality and I them for helping me dance spontaneously a little more, if only in my dreams.

Forbidden Planet

I have returned, after a lengthy lapse, to remake a movie on Republican lines, Forbidden Planet. I can't, however, seem to get past casting, and not for want of good candidates. There are far too many to start. Help me here. I can't picture anyone but Lindsey Graham as Robby the Robot. Would he work?

In the crucial role of Dr Morbius we have to evaluate the insidious ids of some scary characters and I fear I may not come back from that intact. We will cast him on the basis of the id alone, whose is darkest and deepest and most representative of irrational, right-wing fears. There are monsters there.

The monster itself is easy. It's Hispanics, Muslims and other vessels, made-up as carriers of the inner, repressed nastiness of the collective id of conservatives, embodying all the aggression and insecurity, objectified. They are props, vehicles and substitutes, innocent victims of the primal, conservative fear.

The fear of themselves. Who's number one? They are, the punitive masterminds of their own destruction and the destruction of us all. We are all inadvertent casualties, incidental to the id's imperatives. It's why it doesn't register, when people suffer and die all over the place because of them.

The primal drama must play out. Or maybe we should stop it. We're enabling it, after all. For now we are prisoners, which is a fair result and representation of that right-wing drive, with its cynicism and contempt for life, except for that of the "unborn," those innocents. The rest of us are guilty.

Guilty of having been born, it seems, of having begun our sentence in the prison, plantation or work-farm of life, however you choose to see it, and it's wrong to try to escape or make it less than unpleasant, the point of every plank in a unified and comprehensive conservative platform of misery.

I Have Nothing To Hide

At least, not that I can remember.

How Ya Gonna Keep 'Em Down on the Farm?

After they've seen D.C.? The cotton is high and the living is easy:

The corporate money flows and the graft, it grows, as they dole it out droves, the lobbyists, you know, greasing it all for those that have it, so they can have more. They need it, they need it, they need it, they need it: it's all you ever hear. They will never be the same, and you will never be the same, after you've seen D.C.

Down On Me

At the end of every Republican presidential debate I feel that I want to hear a rousing choral rendition of Down On Me a la Janis Joplin. You would think that these unbelievably privileged people had been hounded, all their lives, by horrible, mobile cactuses or something, chasing them around, the way they talk.

The world is down on them, alright, but not in the way that they portray it.

Absolution

Maybe there's an unintended consequence to feminism, that some guys feel absolved from any ethical requirement to treat women well, since women have declared themselves to be equal and not in need of the condescension of having men look after them. 

It didn't depend on a power disparity, though, and mean that it was open-season on women, since this wasn't the norm anyway, that it was already open-season on anybody, not if you weren't a sociopath to begin with. You sometimes hear the bullshit phrase "it's just business."

This, as though there's a realm in which, in the name of profit and money-making, it's fine to be unethical and a crook and a schmuck and an asshole. Back at you, big-boys. What they want, these people drawn to unprincipled power, is for it to only work in one direction.

They're never the ones being messed with. No. Fucking no. The rules have to apply fairly to everyone. I may propose a union, of women, where they keep track of the men who do this stuff and get back at them, depriving them of sex. And money and other things, the jerks.

From Jesus to Dick Cheney

How do you get from Jesus to Dick Cheney? You don't. You can't. 

Live and Let Live

I met an original, live-and-let-live kind of Lab today. Happiness on four legs. Why can't people be more like that?

Ben Carson

Republican cynicism and self-loathing are coming home. They hate government but they are government. The financial guys play the same game, all short-term. They hope they get out before the big one, the next massive crash they cause. It's musical chairs with our money.

So with the American state. There is no long term. Jesus is coming anyway. Ben Carson is a surgical savant and, typically for a savant, an idiot outside of his area of proficiency, but being an outsider is all that counts and he's the latest un-whatever and anti-everything.

The righties have painted themselves into a corner, requiring a candidate who despises what they themselves are, and they won't get out of there with patience and aplomb. No way. They'll go all reactive and crazy, their proclivity anyway. Let Ben Carson play foosball.

It's his other great skill. The little opposing foosball guys can all be done up as Muslims and other heathen. Let him live out his fantasies in foosball, harmlessly kicking ass at that.