Saturday, December 31, 2016

One-Trick Operation on a Downslope

Donald Trump is a one-trick operation. He was all aggression and expansion at a time when, on average, it played out well in New York City. America is already on the downslope of that. If he doesn't adjust it might get ugly, and now not just for him.

The Donald-Centric Universe

Donald Trump feels like a turning point and I don't know for what. Roosevelt mastered radio politics and was bigger than the medium. Kennedy, ditto for television. Trump may have mastered something, maybe social-media or virtual-reality politics, getting a positive response because he was careless and seemed bigger than the new thing and adept.

Whatever, but he is bigger than his britches. We haven't elected a capitalist hero but an avatar and icon of selfishness and excess. And we have devalued ourselves and asserted our own, relative worthlessness and Trump knows this and is acting with a sense of impunity and he isn't even president yet. I think we've been fired as citizens and don't know it yet. 

Friday, December 30, 2016

What a View

Donald Trump is the dog and we are the tail. We are stuck with this because it's his view and we elected him. All this guarantees us is four years as an appendage and as spectators with a great view of his ass.

Thursday, December 29, 2016

Seven Year Itch

I can't reconcile myself to the idea that Americans actually wanted Trump so I think it must be a desire for change and an unconscious attempt to balance things out--to follow a fat pope with a skinny one, as the Italians say. Well, we have certainly accomplished that. Also, the Republican establishment, through aggression and marketing acumen, fully exploits the uncertainty of the unknowable, what might have resulted if things had been otherwise.

My expectation is that the country would have been much safer and better off without Bush and worse without Obama but I can't prove it, and that's not allowing for the right-wing attempt to nullify Obama's presidency and deny his citizenship, his religious observance and even his humanity. Republican politicians not only disallow that Democrats are their worthy partners in running the country but deny them their rights as citizens whenever possible.

Anyway, assuming Trump's election is at least partly the result of an electoral glitch and an itch popping up near the end of a two-term president's tenure--somewhere in the seventh year, perhaps--I want to know if Donald gets his thrills from having the breeze from the New York City subway grates blow up his trousers in the summertime, aerating his endowment, or in what other ways, since the babe in this family isn't Melania or Ivanka, it's Donald.

Wednesday, December 28, 2016

No Joy

One part of the faulty indoctrination we've received in the American myth is to expect polarity and simplicity--that good and evil won't be intertwined, for example, and that we are good and that evil will arise looking like Charles Manson and that we will see it instantly and kick its ass. But deceit is inherent in evil and, though there's been an evolution, Donald Trump is as close as we will probably get to a vision of evil arising fully-formed and easily-recognizable.

Trump is the evil arising from us, the embodiment of all of our innate American weaknesses in heroic aspect, meaning out-sized and exaggerated. If Trump's life is one big avoidance of facing the reality of himself, that he is pathetic, the same is true of us and if we can continue to deny the truth about ourselves we are to the world what Trump is to America, an enormous, offensive, unsustainable celebration of the joys of selfishness and irresponsible living. 

He may represent the last opportunity we have to confront our failings before we succumb to them, though I thought this about Bush and we came out on the other side of that, nominally intact, an indication of the resiliency of our system. It may also be that we are already doomed no matter what we do, that it is a national identity crisis coming to fruition and that we have to get right down in the ditch and then be reborn as something entirely different.

If that's the case then it's reassuring that "entirely different" may look more like the best of what we were and less like Trump but it's sad that there's so little joy in our carelessness. If an orgy of consumption really made us happy it would redeem some of the waste, but our puritanical roots keep us always from either owning our shit or enjoying the debauch. I don't see any joy in Trump or us but only compulsion and an insatiable need and unfillable void. 

Tuesday, December 27, 2016

Trump Mass

The Trumps went to Midnight Mass and got cheered. If Henry VIII were around they would probably be cheering beheadings at that church. Good show, those Episcopalians. Don't ever let your principles put you out or get in the way of a good time.

Sunday, December 25, 2016

My Search for Prescience

Certain book titles pop up in my head--I wonder why the ones which do--and Smiling Through the Apocalypse recurs these daysa collection of articles from Esquire from the 1960's. It must resonate with my enforced participation in the spectacle of Trumpism and all-irresponsible impending government, but I know that Trump may somehow end up looking good through the luck of Reagan and the laundering of Fox News. Anything is possible but accountability is unlikely. 

After all, even following the multiple calamities of the Bush years, Iraq and Katrina and economic collapse, each showcasing Republican malfeasance and incompetence, we soldier on as though there is any doubt whatsoever about who caused what, so I am looking now for prescience in past journalistic writings. The current stuff is too prejudiced by the onslaught of Republican unreason, a typhoon and tidal wave of ill-will and bias preventing any normal digesting of events.

Yet again--and this goes back to Jimmy Carter and Paul Volcker's hard medicine--a Republican may benefit from the Democrats playing grownup and trying to run the country well in spite of right-wing sabotage, foot-dragging and intransigence. If I were to characterize it I would say that I'm looking for what it was that we were taking for granted--intelligence and inclusion and decency, maybe. I'll let you know what I discover, the essential question being what the fuck has happened to us.

Now to try to find that book...

Some time later: Not only did I find Smiling Through the Apocalypse but I read the editor Harold Hayes's introduction and I already have an opinion which I will share with you and refuse to delete or alter in order to hold my own feet to the fire and require accountability from myself. The difference I see is respect, on many levels. I recall reading somewhere of someone who worked on relationships and he said he could tell instantly in a restaurant which couples were doomed. 

If he could see contempt the relationship was already over and everything else was a formality. Americans now not only have contempt for one another it is personal. The kind of contempt I remember--and still support--was for behaviors, which are circumstantial and changeable, however deeply rooted. The new contempt has nothing to do with behaviors--rather with identity, conformity, adherence to certain opinions and other arbitrary and accidental things--and it is therefore racist. 

So we are locked in a relationship with crazy people, effectively addicts and compulsives--everything else is a formality. There is no Union, to begin with. The disrespect extends to everything else except money and power, as I see it. There is no respect for the institutions and traditions of our country, the latter especially since it is more between-the-lines and easily reinterpreted and subverted, not that the denial of scientific consensus​ has been a particular problem.

Respect is learned at the foot of the hill of one's selfhood, of having a sense of individuality, of place, of authenticity, personal integrity, responsibility and security. The hang-up, I suspect, is with authenticity, the baby-boomers having been raised in the homes of greatest-generation parents and feeling that they will never measure up, so they reject the entire frame of reference and assert themselves simply by existing in the brave, ugly new world they inadvertently create. 

There's nothing positive about it, being a byproduct of Oedipal outrage, narcissism and a sense of smallness, giving it a paranoid aspect. Once you start blowing things up where do you stop? As with George W. Bush the destruction is an end in itself, the only way he can find a place within a context rid of his father's shadow, by standing in the ruins of daddy's civilization, not an "end" in that it's irrational and unsustainable and futile. It's nihilism, the antimatter of intelligibility.

Harold Hayes represents a rational, intelligible, integrated system of higher standards but--and this is the matter for my reading of the articles--did anyone see it? Did anyone diagnose and comprehend it, that the sixties cliche of rebellion and non-conformity was operating within the system as a corrective but that the right-wing crazies, who identified with authority and came up short, would overreact and destroy the order they wrongly saw as threatened by sixties culture?

To be continued... 

Or, maybe not. This post is getting too long, probably under the influence of those articles from Esquire, so I will end it here and take it up later, I hope, in another entry. To the enemies of Trumpism: Hang in there. Despair gets us nowhere, but attack when you can. Yes, they are the enemy and we are the good guys and victory is possible. If there is accountability, out there somewhere, it is on our side and if not we were always screwed anyway.

Over the River and Through the 'Hood

My friend Daniel Chavis is lead singer in a band called The Veldt and my go-to and guy-on-the-ground when it comes to the ongoing and insidious shafting of black people in America. American blacks are a unique group, a caste and class invented by white people and burdened with all the incidental evil of white consumer culture and forced into service to act as a repository for everything earthy and rooted in reality and whatever else makes white America feel unexceptional, banal and uneasy.

The sick American myth of exceptionalism and worldly and otherworldly superiority is still pervasive and increasingly absurd as we demonstrate to the rest of humanity how stupid and fucked-up we are, partly by our defensiveness. Anyway, Merry Christmas, Daniel. Thank you for helping to keep me in touch with this unfortunate situation. Daniel is taking care of his grandmother this Christmas. She's old as shit but still feisty and characteristically enduring, as black people must be in a white man's America.

Merry Christmas, Donald

It's Christmas and I want to say something kind of nice about Donald Trump: he isn't vapid. 

Saturday, December 24, 2016

Degeneration

We are about to have an openly degenerate president--certainly a crook, probably a rapist but not yet a murderer. Oh, but those drones--the weapon of choice of cowards. He will love them and the feeling of power and impunity of the whole role of POTUS. We know that he has nothing resembling a conscience. But how far down will the country go with him?

Yo' Mamacare

Donald Trump and Paul Ryan's first foray into legislative cooperation is expected to be the longed-for and long awaited replacement of Obamacare with their cost-saving and streamlined and highly effective alternative, Yo' Mamacare.

They will hire 30 or 40 experienced, out-of-work customer service professionals of the surly and thick-skinned variety, thereby reducing unemployment, and obliterate the entire existing Obamacare infrastructure and lay off all those foot-dragging administrators and workers who have been mercilessly sucking off the nanny-state. Any American in need of health insurance or with other concerns, such as heart attacks, strokes or gunshot wounds, can dial 1-800-yo'mama during normal business hours and be connected with one of those newly-hired operators or placed on hold.

Callers will be reassured with utterances and exclamations of "yo' mama" for as long as they want and referred to the nearest emergency room and encouraged to get off their fat and lazy asses and get help and then return to work as quickly as possible and quit sucking off the government. Ryan and Trump will retain their own excellent existing health insurance in order to avoid any conflicts of interest though they say they wish they could sign up or at least call, since there's no real plan to sign up for, but they know the service will be great and beautiful and the envy of the world.

Friday, December 23, 2016

Oh Come Let Us Abhor Him

Why? Because he thinks he's Jesus.

You're a Piss-Ant, Donald Trump

The image of Trump's hideous, scowling visage, now hard to avoid, tests one's vocabulary and comprehension in its horribleness. None of the terms that technically apply to him, like piss-ant, can capture, contain or encompass the expansive awfulness of Trump. All we can do is to continue to accurately and rationally and unemotionally describe the biggest piece of shit in the history of the world. Oh, I guess that was kind of emotional and vituperative.

Anti-Trump Elixir

All I want for Christmas is some anti-Trump elixir. It's out of character for me to wish ill on anyone but, come to think of it, there's a whole list of people now I'd just as soon see dead. If someone has to have cancer of the prostate, scrotum or rectum, heavily metastasized, why can't it be Trump and Paul Ryan and Jeff Sessions and some of these other pernicious, loathsome, fear-mongering, attack-dog monstrosities. I wish I believed there was a hell for them to rot in and that they would be there soon, with their consciousness and individuality intact enough for them to reflect on their assholedom and what pieces of shit they were for their entire lives and the harm they did.

That's how I feel. And, so, how are you this holiday season? Merry Christmas to you.

Tuesday, December 20, 2016

A Foggy Day in Washington

My weather report for Washington is fog for the next four years, a fog of unreason and of a war on the true American values of fair-play, intelligence and decency.

Sunday, December 18, 2016

He's a Winner

We have been so conditioned to think that good guys win we automatically think that winners are good guys, even in the case of Trump. He's so obviously not a good guy but we want to make him out to be worthy to save our own hurt feelings. Really, we need to resist him in every way possible.

Risky Business

I don't think it's possible to comprehend the problem represented by Trump as it's occurring but we have an example of what a buffoon and ignoramus can do for you at just enough distance to begin to see it clearly. George W. Bush was a catastrophe for the country and we think we got away with it but the seeds of destruction are still sprouting, partly in the election of Trump. Looking back at Bush's performance is hard because, like 9/11 or the shuttle disaster, it's too painful. 

We have wanted a corrective, tempting fate with Bush and Trump and other such idiots and playing brinkmanship with national decline and failure in a search for reassurance caused by perversity, insecurity and immaturity, assuming it will be a hand-slap or an ambiguously sexy spanking, but the forces of justice and accountability of the universe might skip right to mortal measures. In any case, playing around with such risk other than from necessity is really foolish. 

In a rational world risk is a means to an end, not an end in itself--a reluctant tactic and not an objective. When it is an objective it's a function of hidden, irrational, psychological needs, false ideation and delusional thinking. All of it relates to a desire for the numbness and the release of death or other sadistic or masochistic impulses. Emotionally healthy people don't want to die or suffer or see it happen to others and can handle the simple, social responsibilities of life.

Thursday, December 15, 2016

The Scam

Modern Republicanism is a hoax and a scam. Tax cuts for the rich are bad for everyone. They don't create jobs and they destabilize the economy and destroy the middle class. 

Wednesday, December 14, 2016

Say "Yes, Master" or You Will be Punished

The Trump nut is a hard one to crack but even his supporters would have to agree, on a good day, that he thinks he is above or outside of the law. I think those who voted for him did so believing that he is on their side in his lawlessness, that he is our ass-kicker and that he will defend our interests the way he has his own, aggressively and without conscience.

In other words, we deliberately elected an asshole. "He's our asshole" you might argue and I wouldn't disagree, but asshole tactics only work for the stronger entity. We are the strongest entity around but it could change and we have implicitly declared open season on ourselves. If any country of people has ever been lucky as hell it is us and we are acting like animals. 

Whatever, but Donald Trump has been hired and is representative of us and I think it goes back to fear and pessimism and regression to an earlier evolutionary state of warring lords and clans such as our own Angles and Saxons and maybe a few Jutes. Weren't we supposed to have outgrown this? So much for moral progress and the ethical evolution of mankind.

It sickens me that we are such pigs but we are all along for the ride now, barnacles on a pirated ship of state or, for his supporters, warts or whatever on Donald's ass. There's dignity for you. Donald and the Kochs and their ilk are above the law and the working class is screwed and black people can be abused and shot and killed anytime and without recourse.

Welcome to the new America of Trump and a bunch of rich dicks who care only about themselves, and many thanks to the un-rich idiots who voted for this, in their inconceivable ignorance, and have sent us all to hell. 

quia quod stultum est Dei sapientius est hominibus

We now see that any supposedly principled objections Republicans had to Donald Trump were based on the assumption that he would lose the election. Even they knew that he deserved this but, behold, he is now their anointed one and the agent of God and all things good, circular reasoning being a hallmark of modern Republicanism. Whatever happens it is the will of God. Somebody should check with God on this.

Sunday, December 11, 2016

Going Downton

The American infatuation with Downton Abbey is telling and timely since we are becoming a class culture and undergoing the infantilization of our electorate and the abandoning of the responsibilities of a democracy, namely not voting authoritarian nuts into high office who got into their position by accident of parentage and the application of money. It fits perfectly with the increasing reality of inherited wealth and reduced social mobility. 

And, wait and see, the disparities are going to skyrocket as anyone who has done the math knows--and that was before yet another election debacle of a victorious moron with monarchical tendencies vowing more tax cuts for the rich. But are we only unwilling at this time to assume the duties of our democracy or incapable? I don't know, but the election of Donald Trump, a truly loathsome and inappropriate guy, argues for incapacity.

They're Getting Hosed in Spanish Harlem

There will be hard days ahead for historically ethnic neighborhoods in good locations, with pressure for gentrification and the increasing impoverization of the natives. In other words, nothing new but with an all-tycoon administration in Washington it's sure to get worse. 

Say What You Mean

"Doublespeak" has a foreign ring to it, a word-aura of strangeness with nefarious undertones, but it's everywhere now. It's our national language. 

No, the Message is the Message

With the election of Barack Obama many of us hoped that the insanity of the Bush years had been repudiated and that there would be a return to responsible government but it didn't happen. The structural corruption of the system is too great to act intelligently and speak the truth from within. Oddly, we have to work from without to try to restore our government to its intended function, especially with the election of Trump, an outsider and outlier even by Republican standards and someone for whom the medium, himself, is the message.

Saturday, December 10, 2016

Comrade President

Vladimir Putin appears to have recognized a thug bro' and fellow traveler in Donald Trump and tried to influence his election, I expect for amusement or just to stir the pot, as leaders of his type are prone to do, though more commonly with a minor genocide or a coup or two. 

Vlad is a regular Dennis the Menace when it comes to it. It's probably mischief in this instance, not mayhem, and considering that the CIA wrote the book who are we to object. Personalities like Putin and Trump are unlikely to sit around and watch the flowers grow.

Friday, December 9, 2016

What Makes a Sick Prick Tick?

Paul Ryan is one sick unit. What kind of person spends his entire life trying to screw his fellow citizens?

They Fought the Rock and the Rock Won

Someone on the Main Street in my town went after a huge boulder sticking up in their yard with a hydraulic hammer on a big tractor. The rock won.

Thursday, December 8, 2016

How Still We See Thee Lie

The lies of the Republicans seem to be reaching a crescendo but I have thought so before and have to remind myself that they are not "lying" but offering inclusion in an alternative world in which there is no truth. They are not operating in the old arena of accountability and sense, so there is no crescendo. 

It's a doppelgänger society-within-a-society. Actually, responsible citizens are now the "within" part, a subculture of believers in justice, intelligibility and the American Way, but they suck, as a rule, at the leaping-of-tall-buildings and with Trump they have been defeated to a degree we didn't think possible.

Incensed

I have the balsam incense out for Christmas and Pandora is streaming holiday music into my house day and night and I'm so aware of how many of the songs in some way owe their existence to someone from the expanding list of embattled and persecuted groups certain un-festive persons are going after with new vigor now that we have a president-elect who makes Scrooge and Potter look like pussycats and Camp Fire Girls. 

My idea is to deprive the right-wingers of all the good things we owe to gays and blacks and Hispanics and Middle Easterners. I guess that includes Apple computers now in addition to a shit-load of songs by Johnny Mathis and Nat King Cole. Aesthetically they will be somewhere reminiscent of a cultural wasteland and I'm pissed enough to go forward with my plan to end the scam and push for raising taxes on the rich folks. 

"OH, MY GOD!" they will scream, but I'm going after their money. It's all they care about anyway--except for the suicidal religious fanatics--and it's the only thing that will get their attention. We'll burn some of their greenbacks on building infrastructure and feeding children and the poor and other insane, wasteful stuff that doesn't get you anything outside of their gated communities. I won't torch them personally but the money is fair game.

Quest for "Fired"

Arrested adolescents like Donald Trump are constantly either challenging or kowtowing to authority because it's an issue for them and they are incapable of adult independence and cooperation. Deep-down they want strength in response and to be reassured of the resiliency of authority and of the world's institutions. 

In Trump's case the pathetic grandstanding and bullying want to be countered, commanded and ultimately suppressed so that the underlying and still embryonic conscience can express itself and grow into maturity without the constraints of all the anti-social acting-out. In other words, Donald himself is dying to be fired.

Wednesday, December 7, 2016

Dr. Stranglelove or: How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love the Hair

I have run a decryption analysis on Donald Trump's tweets and learned that his head is a small, thermonuclear device, the hair hiding the detonators and much of his gray matter being displaced or compacted rendering the frontal-lobe functions all but inoperable. This explains how a person with so much inherited wealth can behave as though he is under constant threat of annihilation.

He is. In the tweets there are encoded messages with vestiges of his humanity crying out and hoping to break the grip of the bomb's programming and protocols which enslave him and cause the compulsive, nonsensical, attention-garnering behavior. It's all a cry for help. His real personality--slothful, self-indulgent and weak-willed--is imprisoned and encapsulated within the confines of the bomb-casing of his head.

My sources in New York tell me that Trump's sexual proclivities are rumored to include asphyxiation, uncertainly of which participant, but it could undoubtedly trigger whatever fail-safe mechanisms are associated with the bomb, in anticipation of its host's demise, and cause it to detonate, providing the climax, perhaps, that Donald has always wanted, though it's now possible that the national seat of government will be destroyed as well. The threat is considered remote but real. 

Monday, December 5, 2016

What is Sin?

Some people think it's sinful to enjoy life. I think it's sinful not to.

Sunday, December 4, 2016

He Can't Take a Joke

Our boy Donald is as intolerant of ridicule as he is ridiculous. He embodies exceptionalism. That SNL should lampoon him! Much better men have endured and tolerated or enjoyed it.

But not Donald. He then takes to Twitter, a world of fragments and shards of meaning and momentary and ephemeral existence--a place for poseurs and dilettantes to flee to. 

He can tweet his ass off. It won't change the truth, that he's a petty, little person--preening and overly sensitive and vain and narcissistic. I can't believe he's going to be our president.

No Better, Maybe Worse

What a disappointment. We are no better or worse than anyone else. I thought we were better but only because of circumstances--our good fortune to have escaped from imperial and colonial crap and internecine wars and to have the resource endowment of the gods. 

We were never any better, only incredibly lucky, and with Trump we may show that we're the lowest of modern developed democracies, which is where we have been trending, to outlier status in the care of our people and the environment. We may be worse than everyone else.

Saturday, December 3, 2016

Friday, December 2, 2016

Bull in a Chinese Shop

Donald Trump dove into Chinese politics today knowing that he can do no wrong because he is--ahem--Donald Trump and his greatness is now more manifest than ever. He spoke on the phone with the leader of Taiwan, something the Chinese will see as an affront. I hope they cut his balls off. He needs to learn some respect.

We Are Off the Hook

It has long irritated me how incompetent the Democrats are at fighting back against the Republicans. They don't even have to make stuff up. Republicans have trashed everything they've touched for over 35 years, or longer. 

With the election of Trump American voters have been proven so stupid I will no longer blame the Democrats for not criticizing the Republicans more effectively. If people can elect a piece of rubbish like Trump it was hopeless anyway. 

Those voters have elected the leaders who have despised them and screwed them for decades. It's time to take them at their own appraisal of themselves, that they are in fact despicable and not worthy of having decent lives.

All About Donald

Seeing Trump in action you begin to understand all the talk about narcissism. Everything is about him. There's 300+ million Americans but all that matters is Donald. He must feel good. He must show off. He must be the center of attention. 

Watching this has no appeal. It's pretty disgusting but it sure beats pondering the potential for disaster his administration has. A whole lot of human suffering may be the result. I really think Donald is indifferent, as long as he's enjoying himself.

It's amazing that our once-great country has elected someone to its highest office for the voyeuristic and secondhand and vicarious experience of watching him get his rocks off. It's not something I care to savor but it will be hard to avoid.

Thursday, December 1, 2016

Ding-Dong, Donald, Ding-Dong

Are those holiday bells, Donald, or just the doorbell? Oh, look, it's Mitt, master of only a few hundreds of millions of dollars so he's sniffing around for more. How they come, this holiday season, purportedly seeking jobs or summoned in that cause but really just wanting to be in on the scam. And the frog's legs!

American Babylon

America is shit. We are the biggest pigs ever. And now we have four years to look forward to of massive oinking noises emanating from Washington. If it's a swamp, as Donald proclaims, we've traded it in for a sty. 

Wednesday, November 30, 2016

I Have My Trump to Keep Me Warm

I will date the end if our republic from 1994 or 1995, with the election and investiture of the 104th Congress--the Newt Gingrich crowd--and the intensifying of the disenfranchisement of masses of decent, deserving American citizens. The Gingrichers were new and different: strident, self-righteous, determined and certain of their mandate as bomb-throwers and blackmailers. 

Fast-forward to now and the fulfillment of their dream of making the U. S. Government, which has done a relatively enormous amount of good, utterly contemptible. That, in the election of Donald Trump, a loathsome, unattractive and inappropriate person, right up there with the Newtster. Even Trump's critics from within the party are now salivating their way to his Babylon.

Follow the drool if you have any trouble finding the site of the spectacle. They are elementally intent on ensuring the continuing rise of their class and caste in power, wealth and privilege, everyone else be fucked and damned to an ever more precarious existence in the land of plenty. They are deemed to be undeserving and unworthy, many of them having voted their nemesis into power. 

A long Winter may be ahead but we all have something to keep us warm--anxiety for Trump's detractors and the quivering anticipation of those who want to see our State finally demolished or on its knees or maybe just dead and buried, the poor thing. Gingrich himself, that huge, disgusting gremlin, is vibrating with excitement. Finally, the wrecking crew will see their target destroyed. 

Monday, November 28, 2016

Futility Work

Republican politicians have put the country in a bind. It's impossible to combat them effectively because it means betraying what we are. Either way we lose. It's futility work.

Republican Politicians

Republican Politicians are a professional class of crooks, thieves, liars and scum.

Swamp Donald

To the extent that there's a swamp in Washington it's a Republican swamp. It will be interesting to see if Donald acts on his rhetoric. But he is choosing swamp-dwellers in all his major appointments. He can't do much because Republicans have locked it in, anyway, their swamp, because it gives them power and makes them money and so it's impossible to change it very quickly. Welcome to the swamp, Donald. We'll see how you fit in.

Well, That's Rich

It seems that Donald Trump is going to tackle all those blue-collar problems he ranted on about with a lot of screamingly rich people and swamp-dwelling Washington insiders. 

Sunday, November 27, 2016

Fork in the Road

Some people have looked at authoritarian personalities in relation to Republicanism. It's confusing because authoritarianism and dominance require submission. Worldly authority requires subservience, resulting in a loss of humanity on both ends, the authorities thinking they are superior beings and the submissives that they are their lessers.

I have another model. I believe that we are always in a moral situation but that some people want to think that morality is an option, especially in relation to self-interest. They think there are often forks in the road and that realism requires the choice of self-interest over morality. You can return to your principles once you have kicked some ass. 

But an assumed moral vacuum is systemically unsound and unstable. People take on roles for which they are unsuited, as masters and slaves. I think that morality and practicality and self-interest are all in harmony and that morality and self-interest are in fact the same thing, morality embodying the realty of the connectedness of everybody. 

In a situation of individual conscience and accountability authority isn't an issue, it's a convention. The morality of everyday life is inescapable anyway. In the event of that delusion, that people can escape, unnecessary ass-kicking is the result but, once things play out, the ass getting kicked may be your own, and it usually is, sooner or later.

A Sin of Commission and the Horrible Roving Appetite

The election of Donald Trump isn't a matter of error and omission but a denial that there are standards and accountability and an assertion that life is unintelligible. It isn't a fuck-up or a particular failure it's a rejection of the existence of laws and standards. It isn't a lapse in judgment it's a prayer for injustice. It isn't a whim but a declaration that there is no God and no justice and that human beings are nothing but animals, Donald himself being nothing but that: a predatory, hideous roving appetite. He is a monster. I wouldn't stand in his way, apart from voting against him. He's a very scary entity.

Friday, November 25, 2016

A Sober Assessment

Donald Trump's lack of sobriety about the responsibilities of the presidency is sobering. He's charging forward in the usual way, all aggression and bravado and false confidence, expecting that only good things can happen because he is, after all, Donald Trump. In the past his family and gullible bankers have bailed him out. This time it will have to be us.

Duh.

I recall reading, in a course in Church Fathers I took as an undergraduate, some guidelines from those early years for telling false prophets and the religious equivalents of crooked traveling salesmen, who were evidently all over the place, from true prophets and genuine preachers of the Word. 

It recommended that if they take your money and/or sleep with your wives you not trust them. I thought, "duh?" Those people must have been very naïve. Alright, and welcome to the twenty-first century. We elect and respect people who openly steal our money and sleep with anybody they want.

Original Sin

In my opinion Original Sin, as portrayed in the Garden of Eden account, is about taking things for granted. Eve lost her perspective. Consider it: Eve is living in the Garden of Eden, for fuck's sake, and she gets obsessed with the one arbitrary, inconsequential, trivial thing she's told she can't have. She takes her incredible good fortune for granted. 

By this standard we Americans are living massively sinful lives. We take a lot for granted. We aren't thankful at all, really, or certainly not enough or we wouldn't have elected Trump, our new oinker-in-chief. Trump voters know how screwed-up he is. They take for granted that we can get away with it, though we haven't already. It's just happening slowly.

We are in a slow decline and Herr Donald is now our leader, a careless and reckless person--a guy who only knows how to go forward hard and fast and never look back. It's already a loss. The only unknown is how badly it will play out. And we need to reflect on what it means and feels like to live hugely sinful lives. It's not what we expected. 

Our expectation wasn't our own corruption or for it to look the way it does, as it happened. We thought it was always obvious, like in an old movie, but we are the bad guys and don't know it. This is what it looks like on the inside, to give yourselves over to darkness. It looks like Republican politicians and Donald Trump. Eventually this will be obvious. 

It's Our Funeral

I'm looking for a wake. I know it's around here somewhere. It should be interesting. It's a wake for America. 

I Have the Answer

I don't, really. But I have an explanation--for Trump and the decline and demise of America. It's the Civil War, which never ended and has now been won by the Confederacy. The country was not designed to endure a semi-permanent insurrection of states voting consistently and as a bloc and inimically to the core precepts of its founding and its traditions.

It's over as of now--we are living in the Confederacy--but it could be reversed and we could again see an age of e pluribus unum. For now there is no unum--only factionalism. The overriding problem is the lack of accountability. With Trump, for example, he will want to be seen as having done a good job but that has become disconnected from doing a good job. 

There is no accountability and that is the result of forty-plus years of Republican hegemony and, at a personal level, the lesson of Trump's life, as a matter of privilege and property, the holy things of existence in the South stemming from segregation and slavery. But anything other than judging people by behavior and standards of conduct is racism. 

Inequity and unfairness have now been embraced, on average, by the entire nation but it has been a close thing even in the face of the rebel insurrection and the insane amount of money poured into the electoral system by militant, self-serving capitalists. The nation as a whole has held up well. Its system was never intended for this kind of assault from within.

Thursday, November 24, 2016

Our Degraded State

Seeing Donald Trump so full of himself since the election is the last wakeup call any person should need but that call has been coming for decades and we've been too stupid to see it. My God, what a disgrace we are. What a disappointment and an embarassment. We inherited everything and have ruined it all.

Light My Bier

Wow, I'm amazed at how many of the best people I know are taking the Trump thing very hard, not wanting to feel anything anymore. They are the best because their patriotism isn't forced or paraded around needlessly in a narcissistic pitch for ego inflation. They care instinctively and effortlessly about their country and their fellow citizens and understand intellectually and emotionally what the country was supposed to be about. 

And they see clearly the failure Trump embodies no matter what he does. He would only succeed accidentally or to benefit himself in some sick way. I fear another Bush-like outcome--in reality a catastrophe but with no accountability because the right-wing crazies won't allow it. They will spin the mess after the fact or blame it all on the Democrats no matter how obvious the connection between their policies and the outcomes. 

Now, as for me, I've been taking it hard since Nixon so I'm more thick-skinned about it. I think Trump is a disgusting, loathsome, ass-licking hunk of garbage but that's a pretty average Republican these days. Look at his appointees. It's feeding time at the Washington hog-farm and they aren't even there yet, just queued up at the tower awaiting their time at the trough, licking their lips and patting one another in anticipation.

We are the suckers financing the whole thing. It's really very sad. 

Tuesday, November 22, 2016

Trumpanoia

There will probably be a spike in anxiety problems relating to Trump and varying between and within individuals from annoyance to existential fear and requiring exactly the kind of care Trump intends to make unavailable to vulnerable and susceptible persons but it will also probably be a small part of the overall inhumanity of his administration. In other words, be grateful if the prick doesn't deport, prosecute, torture or even kill you. He seems to think it's his prerogative and that power is its own justification. 

Primadonna President

It's going to be a long four years. We have a diva in the wings waiting to be in charge of the executive branch of our government and with the expected result: tirades and tantrums already and everyone tiptoeing around lest his excellency take unpredictable offense, as is his habit, and start throwing his toys, eventually including the likes the American military, around his playroom, now known as the United States of America.

Saturday, November 19, 2016

I'm a Believer

Lying around just now and experiencing existential despair over Trump I want there to be a Jesus and for Jesus to come again and kick some ass. I know with certainty in my heart that Jesus would waste and rebuke the hypocrites and money-changers who now run our country and call themselves Christians while using His Holy Name to promote themselves in this world. My God, I hope there is a Hell for them to rot in. I believe that Evangelical Christians are not Christians but probably working for the other guy, their friend in the fiery place.

No Omar for Trump

Assholes have their place. But every Patton has to have an Eisenhower or an Omar Bradley to rein them in or the results are disastrous. Trump is trending towards an all-asshole government, staffed by a bunch of time-bombs, projectiles, thugs, sycophants and mindlessly aggressive people. On this I have a strong opinion: it is catastrophically bad and the end of life in our country as it was meant to be.

Friday, November 18, 2016

Sub-Ordinary People

The Trump cohort and cabinet is looking like a lot of throwbacks and knuckle-draggers. Remember those Southern sheriffs during the fight for desegregation?  Welcome our new attorney general, Jeff Sessions, an unrepentent racist of the baiting type. He'll toe the line of deniability while doing everything he can to return us to the days of white supremacy. 

A Loyal Public Servant

Well, now, Jeff Sessions is an interesting choice for Attorney General. No one can question that he is a loyal public servant--of the Confederate States of America.

Self-Negation

Everything about the modern Republican hegemony is self-negating. At its core is cynicism about humanity and civilization and a belief in barbarism. It's grounded in fear and a need for unnecessary risk and an unconscious death wish, the hidden nihilism of the country-clubs and evangelical churches. 

We are a playground of Europeans turned loose on a continent of unexploited natural resources without adult supervision. In Trump these children have chosen the parent of their dreams, someone to reassure them that they never have to grow up and that someone else will always pay the bills.

The Poison

In order to have a healthier and happier country Americans have to move money downwards in the system. The ongoing concentration and movement upwards poisons everything. Everybody loses when money moves upwards because wealthy people eventually kill off the relatively affluent consumers they need to buy the shit they produce. That's right--in our country everyone is supposed to have a stake. Sorry, it's so easy to forget.

Thursday, November 17, 2016

Deep-Down...

I bet even Donald Trump thinks the American people are stupid for electing him. 

Wednesday, November 16, 2016

Well-Sized

Now that he's elected I'm reassured to think that Donald Trump has a reasonably well-sized dick. But he's a notorious exaggerator and put the issue into play himself.

Shouldn't it be independently verified? I mean, how could he defend our honor, internationally, otherwise. And those other leaders had better measure up, dick-wise.

Our boy Donald will take them out with his swagger.

Confidence Trickster

Trump's bravado and boastfulness are not rooted in confidence but compensation. His swagger belies his essential smallness.

Personal Defects

Donald Trump ran a very defective campaign but his timing was perfect. Those who most accurately predicted the outcome didn't even consider the candidate, only other factors.

So he won in spite of himself. But try to convince him of that.

Appointments in Gehenna

Any hope that Trump would appoint competent, qualified, rational people to his administration is quickly dissipating.

Revenge of the White People

There's an aspect of anger and revenge in the election of Trump. The working class and religious voters who supported him like the feeling of risking everything. They feel that they have nowhere to go but up, taking a lot for granted, and would love to see wealthier people take a hit.  It was a "fuck you" vote and an unproductive and self-defeating way of asserting themselves and blindly lashing out.

Speaking of Appointments...

Trump seems to be construing his victory as an indication if his greatness. So, if the transition is a mess and he cavorts with and chooses lunatics as appointees and advisors it is--guess what--not a problem because his majesty is already manifest.

Whatever he does it is a success by definition and independently of the consequences, such as they may be: suffering among the poor and lower classes or even societal collapse. We are minor players in this, little people and losers in relation to Trump. 

If this interpretation sounds extreme or melodramatic consider some of the results of the policy fixations of Trump's predecessors, such as an economic convulsion due to deregulatory fervor and the unending violence and chaos in the Middle East.

Trump could do a lot of harm fairly quickly and never look back. His success in the election only reassures him of his superiority but everything in Trump's world is circular, self-justifying, fatalistic and meaningless. Everything only means what he says.

Tuesday, November 15, 2016

The Appointed One

The messianic aspect of Trump's campaign--the "Save America" talk--is continuing after his win and it's worrying. If Donald insists on the savior shtick it could mean a culmination of the trends and fantasies of Reagan and Bush: the ability to see the world as it isn't and the need to play hero.

Arcade on Fire

Americans are so absorbed in and consumed by the video games their lives have become they don't notice that the arcade is on fire. 

Trump and the Feudal Spirit

It's a curious inversion of things, especially in America, when an undeserving upper class is considered beneficent for returning to average citizens what was theirs in the first place, before it was stolen.

Monday, November 14, 2016

Trump! Oy Vey!

God bless the Jews. They always vote massively Democratic. 

Holy Mackerel

Some of my friends are surprised by what they see in me as the placid acceptance of Trump. Trump is a horror but I think that Republicans have been offering up horror for decades so Trump seems less like an exception to me. 

He's an outlier as a human but not as a Republican, I mean. So if I only say "holy mackerel" and not "shit-fuck son-of-a-bitch" it's not from a lack of indignation. It's from forty-plus years of habituation, desensitization and inurement.

Sunday, November 13, 2016

This Is Us

The more I get used to the Trump debacle I realize that he is perfect for us. We are the biggest pigs in the history of the world. 

Saturday, November 12, 2016

We Deserve This

Whatever Trump is we deserve him--the Republicans for nominating him and the Democrats for failing to beat him.

"Birther President"

Just putting this out there. It's such a startling concept.

The Brother of All Battles

I'm sure the Democrats will wuss it up in defeat, as always, and that we will have moans and a spike in the sale of self-help books instead of battle cries and blaring voices. Among the well-heeled on the left--who knows.

They were never that vulnerable after all. But the line of vulnerability is moving up and to the right. With Trump the bell is tolling for all of us. I think it would be good to encourage it on up and rightwards in any way possible.

Friday, November 11, 2016

Trump Against Cancer

Trump isn't an ideologue he's an idiot. He needs adulation and will want to be admired as a president and be well-remembered.

He may do okay. And if he destroys us it will probably be fast, like a heart attack, and not the horrible cancer of Cruz or Rubio.

Thursday, November 10, 2016

Sarah in Botswana

I suggest we appoint Sarah Palin ambassadress to Botswana. I think there's big game there she can hunt. I love the idea of getting her out of the country. The Trump boys could visit and hunt with her. Maybe one of them would have an affair with her. She's probably past the age of reproduction but, my God, what a genetic makeup that kid would have had.

The lesson in the Trump family would have to be that any kind of sexual impropriety is just fine and likely to be rewarded. And Bill Kristol could be posted to Swaziland. There's an opportunity here to get some of these rich right-wingers out where they can do some good or whatever and off of their asses. And, again, out of the country and out of our hair. 

American Hysteria

White women voted for Donald Trump, as they did for George W. Bush in '04, and by about the same margin. Now, girls, will you please shut the fuck up. Get your own house in order.

Wednesday, November 9, 2016

Dream On

For less fortunate Americans who want to do better Republicans have always had an answer: dream on. If Trump is an outsider to this attitude--well, good. I'll believe it when I see it.

Big Flirt

In some ways I don't feel that bad about Trump. We've been flirting with this outcome for decades, playing brinkmanship with political insanity. Maybe it's better to get it out in the open. And maybe Democrats will get a clue.

Orientation

Can you imagine what Trump's presidential orientation will be like? It must be sobering for anyone, even an experienced elected official or civil servant, to be introduced to the responsibilities of the presidency. With the callow Trump it will be a heady initiation into a new world and into a range of duties and a circumscribed and curtailed scope action unfamiliar to him, not to say that he can't and won't do an amazing amount of damage.

Trump Isn't the Problem

The problem is the people who voted for Trump. He would be nowhere without them.

It's the Confederacy, Stupid!

To Paul Krugman and the other clueless commentators of his type I say: wake up! None of what you decry would have happened without Southern, evangelical Christians. This is the revenge of the rebels and the racists. 

Will the Democrats Finally Wake Up?

I don't think so. Their obliviousness is astounding.

I Won't Miss Hillary

I won't miss Hillary. On a lot of international issues I may agree more with Trump, such as interventionism.  But, domestically, Trump is a disaster and the impulses behind him are horrifying. Commentators are saying that Trump voters need to be heard and this is true. 

But they have voted for the people who screwed them. That is in a context which is a fantasy and a delusion propagated by wealthy, self-interested people and exemplified by Fox News. It's all a lie and the victors in the election are immersed in that world of lies.

Black Mass

Reports are coming in. Trump supporters are dancing around the fire at their black mass celebrating the end of America.

Reflexive Election

What has happened with Trump is reflexive. It not only redefines our present it redefines our past. We are not the people we thought we were. 

Soul Sacrifice

With a Trump presidency now assured soul-selling in America has reached critical mass. The only argument to be made to dull the blow is not about Trump--his personal attributes are apparent--but to rewrite our past and redefine ourselves, formally, as a country of losers, idiots and evil-doers. 

The Bush presidencies now seem to be something different, the voices crying from the sticks and weeds heralding the age of political hacks, to culminate in Trump, who is not Machiavellian but a pig and a crook of epic aspect. Reagan was a marketer of fantasy and Nixon the original soul sell-out.

Where did we go wrong and where do we draw that line? When was the beginning of our end? It's not so dramatic--but more dramatic than we thought. The failure was accomplished by the idea that the ends justified the means and that only one of our political parties was fit to rule. The rest followed.

The World Watches in Horror

For all of my adult life I have had no political representation--no say in how I am governed--because I disagree with the direction my country has taken. We should be leading the world on environmental issues and energy conservation. 

We should have guaranteed health care and a decent standard of living and secure retirement, fewer guns, smaller prisons and an advanced infrastructure. It's one thing not to get your way but another to be disenfranchised and marginalized. 

That's un-American. But what is American anymore? If Donald Trump is American then I am not. What do you say after "screw you"? That sentiment has won the day with Trump. For decades decent, tolerant citizens have had to suck it up. 

Their backward fellow citizens, now empowering Trump and empowered by him, have had to be humored in order for life to go on at all. And what do we get? The return on our investment in tolerance and civility is a catastrophe of incivility. 

The Age of Trump has come. The triumphalism and gloating will be a thing to remember. Nothing can redeem us now. We are lost.

Tuesday, November 8, 2016

Auto Fuck-Us

Assuming Hillary wins we then head into the well-known, current partisan political phase known as auto fuck-us. This is where the Republicans plan and then execute strategies to cripple any successful Democrat. It is unconstitutional and treasonous but they don't care.

Update, 11/9/16: Auto Fuck-Us is turned off.

Who's Deplorable Now

As horrible as Trump is one of the images that sticks most in my mind, from the background press on the election, is from a clip of Hillary rejoicing at the sight of Qaddafi's dead body. What kind of person does this? Who knows what any of us would have been like in a different life and situation.

The West is so implicated in the Middle East mess going so far back it's impossible to know who is responsible for anything. No one should ever rejoice at the death of anyone. We are all implicated in everything. Hillary may find out what it feels like to get kicked around some more, as is threatened.

The Republicans are involved in a vast, informal, right-wing conspiracy of common intent. They don't need to meet in secret and hatch plots. That shit us well-hatched and widely appreciated and available. Hillary is a favorite target already. The next body on the ground may be figuratively hers.

Sunday, November 6, 2016

The Atwater Index

Lee Atwater may not have been the biggest turd ever to rise so high in politics but it's hard to imagine anyone with more, overall pernicious influence. I hereby propose the creation of the Atwater Index of Perniciousness, or AIP, a linear-scale measure of terrible effects, with Newts and Bushes and DeLays and Ryans prominent on the inaugural list. 

Actual destructive output relies on more than moral degradation. Opportunity, ambition and social and administrative skills also play a part and the availability of a pool of subservient evil-doers, like James O'Keefe, Tucker Eskew, Grover Norquist and other such unelected underlings. Who knows what Lee might have achieved had he not died so young. 

Atwater himself never ran for office or was elected but he was the pioneering formosan termite of American politics, head of a hoard of hidden munching machines in the walls and foundations of our democracy. Now, due to Lee and his like, we all live with this apparently ineradicable menace gnawing away at us as in an epic horror or disaster movie.

Alternative Narrative

Trump has shown that almost any narrative is better than none. Still, the Democrats offer nothing. It wouldn't be hard to construct a narrative that Republicans are responsible for everything wrong with America. It wouldn't be hard because it is the observable truth.

Saturday, November 5, 2016

Bite the Little Dog

Republican macho-men like to bite the little dog. What does this tell you? Though, they have their hoards of supporting ankle-biters as well: expendable, aggressive, untrained and recklessly willing. The big dogs are risk-averse. And why not. They have a lot to lose. Widows and orphans, watch out. They are after you or, at least, your share of well-being.

Flanking the Basket

Hillary's "basket of deplorables" is a poor figure of speech. That's one problem. But, more importantly, Hillary has outflanked and run around them, which is bad politics and bad morality. Democrats stand for inclusion and not objectifying anyone. 

Somebody still has to govern. It isn't any easier when you insult people. Hillary should have reminded them, over and again, that Republican politicians cost them their jobs, bankrupted the government and caused the housing bubble and recession.

And, for the icing, Hillary should have pointed out that the right-wing nabobs got rich(er) while doing it, giving the deplorables something to think about while Paul Ryan and his crew screw them in new, imaginative ways. It's probably too late now. 

Friday, November 4, 2016

My Dear Democrats:

I love you but nobody will ever respect you if you continue to get kicked in the teeth without fighting back.

Sincerely,

A Friend

Batten the Hatches

As only Bette Davis can fittingly say, I think we're in for a bumpy ride.

Already Gone

I think we're in a heap of trouble even if Hillary wins. Republicans are wanting an apocalypse for various reasons--some want the game to end while they're on top, others the actual four horsemen--and they are as blindly determined as an average jihadi or suicide bomber.

The impulses of ISIS and al Qaeda are combined among them, those of the lower classes and the elites, but Trump has exposed the fault and it's clear that many of the elites will vote for a thug anyway. The religious, economic and totalitarian purists are still under one roof.

But the whole, damn house is shaking and that's not good, whatever some Democrats think, because the collapse or implosion could engulf us all. Yes, I think it's that bad and looming. Consider the Great Recession, a right-wing creation due to a fetish for deregulation. 

Yes, they can mess things up very badly and quickly. If they continue to tempt fate one of these days we won't get away with it. We won't fully recover, that is, and life will never be the same. It will be sad as hell and it is already. The best of what we were is already gone. 

Thursday, November 3, 2016

The Freudian Melodrama of the Republican Party

It was inevitable that some segment of American society would embody its adolescence but not that it would end up concentrated in a political party. That concentration was an accidental occurrence, I think, due to the opposite of serendipity, whatever that is, though it makes sense that our growing-up would include confronting the original sins of racism, segregation and slavery.

So now we have an angry, adolescent Republican Party having gone juvenile delinquent and wanting to be reassured of the strength of its guardian institutions or see them destroyed. The Democrats won't step in and aren't up to the challenge out of cowardice or poor resolve or a lack of understanding. They are weak and indulgent parents. To be fair it's not their role and responsibility.

But the animus underlying the wedding of the old, white, privileged elite with the racial resentment faction has resonated with the displaced working class and the otherwise dispossessed. What a mess. Anyway, they are hell-raising in search of reassurance of the resiliency of our social institutions. They crave manly heroes of the greatest generation-type to reign them in and make it all okay.

That isn't happening so they are following cardboard heroes for something to do until the roof falls in, fake men's men and pathetic, hollow substitutes who parade their machismo around, though the latest one isn't from Texas, at any rate, and like any wantonly destructive teenager they won't wonder what they're doing until they're standing in front of a heap of rubble feeling stupid. 

Forever Wrecked

The Wrecking Crew, as described by Thomas Frank, has moved from sawzalls to explosives and renovation to demolition. There will only be the equivalents of tents and tipees left, if even that. 

Now "ashes to ashes" is the American ethos. It's simply destruction for the sake of destruction as embodied and typified by Trump, the thug hero. Things will never be the same again. 

Wednesday, November 2, 2016

I need a break.

I'm trying to plan for the electoral outcome, whatever it is, and the only thing that's clear to me is that the process has been traumatic. Trump has threatened not to honor the result, which I don't think he will do but it's more red meat for his barbarians. And the Republicans are openly plotting how to cripple our government for Hillary's entire presidency, assuming she will win. 

You see, this is what happens. 

I intended to write about an escape and a break and I'm instantly sucked into the Republican vortex of insanity. The truth is that I think they are evil but that evil is a normal, naturally-occurring and inevitable thing. Educated people understand this and are on their guard but Rambo movies won't get you there and the Rambo and NASCAR factions are powerful among the Republicans. 

I'll say it again, I need a break.

Fuck Me

There's a big bag of protest voters in the Trump camp saying "screw you" to the rest of us but they're only screwing themselves. This is a result of the excellence of the Republicans in marketing lies and the failure of the Democrats in calling them on it. 

That, and an incredibly stupid and gullible section of the electorate who refuse to accept the protocols and responsibilities of living in a free, rational, democratic society. The idiots will take us all down. They already have and I fear where it will end up. 

A Deliberate Drive

I just can't believe that so many Americans are going to make a deliberate drive to the polls to vote for the piece of garbage called Trump.

Donald, the Trailblazer of Doom

What if Donald Trump is both our past and our future? According to this theory humanity was more or less shot out of a cannon by God or an evolutionary accident and is now on the downward side of a parabolic cultural journey, having clawed itself out of the caves of primitive existence and now facing re-entry into the evolutionary abyss. 

Certainly Trump is an anachronism but it's naÄ«ve to think that his supporters aren't knowingly opting for his brand of barbarism. They must want a return to an aboriginal, animalistic condition. The thought is that civilization in general follows the same observable path of the rise and decline and fall of individual civilizations, making Trump a pioneer. 

Tuesday, November 1, 2016

Non-Representative Democracy

Nobody's favorite answer is "yes and no" but it's too often true and, well, what do you expect when considering a non-representative democracy, a seeming contradiction in terms reflecting a compromised, imperfect reality. Some of the compromise--the gap between pure democracy and what we have--is planned and inherent in the electoral aspect of it and, in that sense, a pure, direct democracy is not representative. 

But, damn, our democracy has headed headlong in the other direction, becoming bizarrely unrepresentative of anybody. We live in a nominally representative democracy but it isn't representative of our aggregated will--pure democracy with the edges rounded off--but representative of the edges, the fringe, the should-be-rounded-off part. That fringe doesn't even get what it wants, non-democracy, but an unintelligible mess. 

The system has collapsed only partially and landed in a distorted democracy, a ridiculous neverland that doesn't serve the longer term interests of anyone. So it's a "yes" to being representative in that it embodies our failure and confusion, that people are voting against their own interests, but "no" in that they have been deliberately duped and misled, wherein is the failure on our part, in detection, in seeing that we are fools.

Monday, October 31, 2016

Objectification

The North Carolina State Legislature, famous for its toilet fixation, has taken the next step in ensuring continuing embarassment and decline, regressively taxing labor under the subheading of "sales and use" as though it isn't already taxed in other ways. 

This is the corollary to declaring corporations to be persons, declaring people to be objects and things to be sold and exploited, completing the detestable dehumanization of our workforce and returning workers to retrograde and antebellum status.

Concise and Clever

Is there a concise and clever way to encompass America's visible failure, as typified by the rise of Trump? A New Yorker cartoon, maybe, or a meme or a skit or a video clip?

Trump the Brute

Having learned of Trump's youthful love of confrontation and violence I know now that he is a brute. But he is a bankrolled brute, one who is too big to fail, notwithstanding that he almost failed anyway and was saved, repeatedly, by his family. What goes on in what they call his "mind," that primitive place where ambition and aggression run everything? 

It's the ethos of financialization and extraction and the harvesting of capital. Every failure is no reflection on him and circumstantial and not representative but the successes are owned and interpreted as indications of excellence and superiority. So, with Trump, he's a failure, given what he was given, but he sees himself as shrewd and as a victorious warrior. 

He thinks he's competing and that he's a winner, his consistent showboating and bragging revealing his sensitivity about this. I've known real winners, people who started with nothing, and not all but many of them are quick to acknowledge their luck. If they are emotionally healthy they know how much they owe to circumstances and opportunity.

But not Trump. The sad, blithering, bullying asshole has to believe he did it all himself and that he's the greatest. I can't believe this mobile mound of shit is actually running for president and that millions of angry, deluded, disgraced, racist Americans will vote for him. Whatever the outcome we deserve to fail but I fear that it will be left to our children. 

Trump Pollution

It's Halloween in Chapel Hill and as much as I love the season everything is tainted now and polluted by Trump. His loathsome presence is always in the background and sometimes in our faces. To my amazement my native state, Ohio, is about to shit itself for the world to see by voting for Trump and formerly notoriously backward North Carolina may escape that humiliation and dishonor--we will see.

Saturday, October 29, 2016

It's Morning in the Movie Version of America

In reality it's darkness at noon.

Dork Democracy

I realized in reading opinion articles by Thomas Edsall in the NYT that I'm surprised at how good they are, probably because there is so little good opinion writing and because he looks like a dork. 

But I look like a dork, I think, and I would surely sink like a stone if I tried to get into a position of authority and influence based on how I appear. I'm weak on composure but I have some skills.

Dorky looking people deserve to be heard. They may be the kinds of people who run things well because they aren't flaming narcissists like Trump and as conceited and self serving and brutish.

I bet Hillary is a dorkess but she's so smart she's compensated her way out of it. Bless you, Hillary. May you win this election and the next. I want a leader as wise and articulate as Thomas Edsall.

A Neocon by Any Other Name

The latest great, desperate brainwave from right-wing think-tank world is that Republicans can forestall the appointment of Supreme Court justices forever or at least as long as Hillary is president. 

This unbiased opinion will, of course, be reversed at the advent of another Republican executive, a neo-neocon or whatever they call themselves now to try to avoid responsibility for the last go-round.

They should give us more time to recover from the messes of that last episode, notably the Iraq war and the 2008 economic calamity, but they are impatient to reinvent our democracy as something else.

Whatever they have in mind, it isn't democracy and I wish the lying, heartless bastards would own it. Regards, Ilya Shapiro, who came up with this pronouncement. I smell a Wolfowitz in the woodpile.

The neocons are alive and well and into another, younger generation of no-accountability policy prescriptions and war-mongering bullshit. Just remember how well it worked out the last time.

Friday, October 28, 2016

Talisman Trump

Sadly, Donald Trump is in some ways representative of America. He was born rich. We were born rich. He has gotten away with being an idiot and a boor. We are often idiots and boors. 

He only cares about himself and sees other people in relation to their usefulness to him. They have no value independently of him. We treat other countries and peoples similarly. 

We see ourselves in relation to a fantasy, as does Trump. There will be consequences in the future but maybe only for our heirs and descendants. We have never had real repercussions. 

There hasn't been the chance because we were born so fortunate we could get away with being dumb and Trump is the talisman of that, its embodiment and protective charm.

Trump makes us feel that our irresponsibility and indecency can go on forever. He is as successful as he is indecent but It was only enabled by the luck of the inheritance. 

Tuesday, October 25, 2016

From the Editor(s) of this Blog

It is our belief that Donald Trump is the most unsuitable candidate to ever run for president. We unendorse him. Vote for anyone else especially Hillary Clinton. Vote against anyone who has consorted with or funded or endorsed him. Make him go away soon and forever.

Shun and ostracize his children, business partners, bankers and associates. Renounce all of his works, brands and buildings. Unfriend, force-quit and delete him. Turn him off, unplug him and throw him away. He contains harmful compounds and cannot be recycled.

The Vulgarian

The new, New York Times article on Trump, based on interviews turned over to but not conducted by them, is the most informative and telling thing I've seen. Trump is a pig and an outlier, his entire life a sham of brazenness and the belittling of other people, an act incorporating a false facade of power and self-sufficiency masking inner and appropriate feelings of worthlessness.

But Trump doesn't concern me. I see him for the nonentity and fraud that he is. Troublingly, though, the Republican electoral machine has belched him into political prominence and it reveals how rotten we are as a country and how incapable we are of being true stewards of our now fading democracy. We are the unworthy heirs and Trump is our populist vulgarian, the very worst of us.

Monday, October 24, 2016

Duck, Donald!

It would be hard to argue that Donald Trump likes to keep a low profile but he does know how to duck.

Whenever, that is, he's accused of anything other than being great, such as being a serial masher and a lout.

Incoming!--Duck, Donald, Duck! The accusations are streaming in because he is a serial masher and a lout.

Sunday, October 23, 2016

Crown of Creation

I still start my shampoo in the middle of the top of my head and there's no hair there.

Saturday, October 22, 2016

Question Authoritarianism

If you hooked people up to a machine measuring emotional reactions to words "authoritarianism" would probably show strong, negative associations. However, it only means farming-out your autonomy and it feels good, like a return to the innocence and freedom of childhood.

In childhood we farm everything out to our parents or it is done for us until the age of reason. But, for grownups, authoritarianism is selling your soul. Adults are supposed to be responsible as individuals, in our traditions as Christians and democrats, to the extent that we are either of these. 

Authoritarianism should not only be questioned it should be instinctively resisted.

Well and Truly Screwed

No matter what happens with Donald I think that we are truly screwed. There are assumptions underlying democracy--a reasonably intelligent and educated electorate, a properly functioning press and so on. We are failing to meet these standards.

Chartered Sociopathy

America is now a country not of individuals but of corporations and their dupes, henchmen, hacks and shills. We are a country on our knees before the gods of greed and the associated lesser deities of personal promotion. Evangelical Christians are most representative of this, with their reciprocal entitlements of blessedness before and after death. 

They think they know the mind of God and that their salvation is assured. It doesn't matter what they do and so they judge everyone else from their superior position, a position like that of the corporations, a moral vacuum of selfishness, self-justification and lawlessness. It's a declaration and assertion that we are nothing more than animals.

Half-Ass Demagogue

With most other countries that have gone self-destructively crazy there are signs of trauma in the chain of causality, usually economic and social disintegration due to something, but what's our excuse? The only hyperinflation is Donald Trump himself and the only civil war is his lost battle for self-control. 

Yes, we have our problems, but nothing to justify the rise of Trump. And he's a half-ass demagogue at that--a faux tyrant and ersatz evildoer. Donald even sucks at being a villain so it's hard to hate him but the stuff he represents well deserves our condemnation so it makes sense to condemn him anyway.

Friday, October 21, 2016

Rubberneckers

Trump shows that we are so in love with spectacle we have taken to staging train wrecks.

Disconnected

The thing that will stick with me about Trump, when the threat is neutralized and he can mercifully recede from my consciousness, is how disconnected he is. I remember being that way as an adolescent boy but Trump has never grown out of it.

Trump Crosses the Rubicon

Trump is willing to use his resources, his potent verbosity and its ability to incite insurrection, against the state. He will do anything to win and, at the same time, he doesn't care because it's a game to him.

He's never known real consequences and it's not our job to help him grow up. But the armies of unreason are another thing. Trump has shown them how far crazy they can go and still carry on. That's a serious problem.

Thursday, October 20, 2016

Downwind

Trump is setting fires behind him but he's downwind of them and moving backwards. Good luck with that, Donald.

Suckabit Ethernet

I'm on the wrong side of the digital divide and it's awful. The communications companies are abandoning large swathes of Americans because they can. This is what you get when the government doesn't work for everyone. Soon, I bet, it won't work for anyone.

Wednesday, October 19, 2016

Will Donald Go Postal?

The last debate is this evening. Trump's attitude seems to be that if he can't win nobody gets to win. Maybe he will blow things up. What an amazing humiliation for us and we brought it on ourselves. I said before (Trump for Resident) that I would allow him to stay in the country, at most.

I rescind that. Trump is not acting residential. He doesn't play well. Trump is antisocial and will deprive anyone of their rights on a whim so I now recommend deportation and that his citizenship be revoked or suspended and that most of his assets be seized. He would do as much to anyone. 

Tuesday, October 18, 2016

Four-Burner Breakfast

What a wonderful time of the year: cool weather and beautiful tree-leaves and harvests and holidays and hearty breakfasts with fried potatoes and onions and peppers and eggs and sometimes sausages. I love to have all four burners going for breakfast. There are no soulless breakfasts at my house.

Charms for the Uneasy Life

Trump and his backers are reverse talismans and inverted alchemists. They bring bad fortune with them and turn gold into tin.

Why Can't We Behave?

My God, so little was expected of us and we are still failing. We inherited strong democratic institutions and enormous capital and impressive infrastructure.

All we had to do was preserve it and we can't even do that. It reminds me of the idea that in order to appreciate something you have to get there yourself.

I've always thought that people could be educated into that appreciation but maybe not. Trump calls everything into question because he embodies our failure.

Make Them Pay

I have just read something about resegregation in the schools and it makes me sick. There should be an impact fee on those choosing private schools, equivalent to the tuition, to ensure that the public schools are well-enough funded.

Voting Bloc-heads

The white men of America are about to declare that Donald Trump should be president. The idiots deserve to be ostracized and embargoed and shunned.

They should be recognized as a protected class of throwbacks and anachronisms and museum-pieces but deprived of their vote to protect us from them.

That is, to protect us from me.

Friday, October 14, 2016

Sullen Admirers

Even among those I know who loathe everything he stands for Trump has sullen admirers. He's a true American character but I wouldn't call him quaint. He's the American id personified. Many families have harmless eccentrics and oddballs and lovable rogues.

But they shouldn't be running things. That's the sadness associated with Trump, sadness for the loss of ourselves, that he has no business in a political role and it's nobody's failure but ours. There's nothing harmless about Trump. He has no conscience at all.

Trump Homer, Frank Trump

Trump has always been cartoonish but now, my God, he is a cartoon. And the hair is too perfect. Trump is Homer--the incompetent, buffoon daddy--but becoming less lovable by the minute.

He's more like a financial version of Frank, the drunken father in Shameless, unable to care for himself and destructive to those around him. His kids try to keep him from total self-annihilation. 

Thursday, October 13, 2016

Clean Install

I think we need a clean install of something. We've completely forgotten what we stand for.

Walk Away

If Donald Trump wins and bankrupts the country he will walk away. It's his means and method--to get other people implicated in his schemes as insurers. He keeps any proceeds and we get the losses.

The Stolid South

In appearance the South is impassive and conservative, enduring and laconic. Don't you believe it. It's a structurally militant place, catastrophically and unconsciously ruled by the legacy of slavery, which is laundered and unrecognizably reconstituted in religious and political institutions. 

And these are nice people. That's why it is so confusing. I see it all the time. Many of the Southerners I know have been interpersonally won over by the Hispanics. And why not? The Hispanics are the most American people among us: open-hearted, hard-working and grateful for everything. 

But try to understand the idea of unconsciously driven behaviors, that there might be underlying motivations controlling your actions entirely below the threshold of awareness. Normally it's easier to see this in other people and then, if it isn't too frightening, it's applied to yourself. 

Ah, but if it is too frightening it gets held-down, repressed, and so the behavior worsens as the denial festers. Denial is empowering--to the stuff that is being denied. Southerners continue to empower the legacy of slavery because they won't own it. Now it is all of our legacy as well.

Antidemocratic Voting

The whole idea of antidemocratic voting is odd and reductive until the implications are drawn, which is that some voters are voting to disenfranchise other voters and that the core and nucleus of this activity is in the South, where systematic disenfranchisement was once the normal way.

As Trump the totalitarian implodes this core is being defined more clearly and, as startling as it is that anyone will vote for this piece of wreckage, it's remarkable how many states will formally declare the most unfit candidate in history to be right for a prestigious and functionality important role.

I don't want any reconciliation after this election. The losing and loser states should be punished, reprimanded and humiliated as openly and thoroughly as possible, by the withdrawal of funds, ridicule and other means. They should be subjected to what they want to do to the rest of us. 

Let's see how they like it. Our country's idiot faction has been humored too long and is on the attack and threatening the well-being of everyone. They must be beaten and their antidemocratic inroads reversed. If they want a monarchy or dictatorship they should move somewhere else.

Wednesday, October 12, 2016

Evil Blowhard Buffoon

Everyone I have talked with from New York City, having had more to do with him, says that Trump is a blowhard and a buffoon. But he seems to have gone over to the dark side, at least in the last debate. I ask you, can a buffoon be evil and malevolent?

Oedipus Mex

The extremity of the Republican daddy-problem is beyond the limits of my understanding of psychology but they haven't had a candidate since Reagan who wasn't under the umbrella of paternal privilege. As these things happen, though, and as I know from my readings, it will be revealed to us as the fixations well up from the Republican collective unconscious.

What a horrifying concept. It's about a concern for who is the provider. Heirs can be insecure in their role as providers because they have the trappings but they haven't had the journey. They are "passers-on" and ersatz providers saddled with insecurity because they didn't do it themselves, whatever their accomplishments, and they may be unsure of their worth. 

Would they have made it without the inheritance? They will never know and so their sensitivity is about usurpers, false daddies, because they are these themselves. Their fear is focused, of course, on those who had the talent to make it on their own, like Bill Clinton and Barack Obama, who are cast as usurpers precisely because they are true providers.

Those who are seen to be competing for the largesse the inheritors jealously want for themselves are also attacked, no matter how much the inheritors already have and how hardworking, willing and deserving the innocent victims of their delusions are, like the Mexicans in the case of Donald Trump. Trump tried to make Obama into a Kenyan.

He tried to disenfranchise him, which makes Obama an honorary Mexican. This is so primal and, naturally, it is because Trump himself is his imaginary Mexican, a rapist and criminal and hanger-on and someone who has nothing to give, someone who has been on the dole his entire life and is still riding the wave of familial wealth and good fortune. 

Tuesday, October 11, 2016

Trump Agonistes (or, "Unshackled")

Well, folks, it's becoming clear that a mediocre outcome will not be ours and I kind of understand it. Flaming wreckage is more appealing to an attention-hog like Trump than sailing into political oblivion on the smooth waters of an unambiguous electoral thrashing, smooth in that it might have been the biggest collective "yuck" ever heard as he exited in a surfeit of slime. 

But Trump is not water he is fire and any thrashing to be witnessed will be his as he cleverly explores the range of hysterics and histrionics in search of spark and combustion, anything other than facing the empty reality of his interior life, a man so utterly oral any retention on the other end and he would explode in no time and give "shit-storm" a whole new aspect and meaning.

I wouldn't want to be within range. I hope I can unshackle "unshackled" from its association with Trump. It's a good word. But the image is compellingly ludicrous. I called to tell my brother about the event and it prevented any further discussion because he couldn't stop laughing, so some good may have come of it already, but I think there will be explosions and fire before it's over.