Those Were the Days

Just for the record, I have not watched one minute of the television coverage of the Republican National Convention, nor do I intend to do so. I am one of those close-minded, judgmental people who already know everything and don’t need any new information. Well, perhaps I am being too hard on myself; perhaps it is more like having once tasted a turd, you know it tastes like shit and the next time somebody offers you one, you don’t need to chomp down on it to be certain that you will not find it palatable. Anyway, I have read many of the reports from the biased socialist, communist liberal media and can safely say that there is nothing new under the sun in the world of Conservative America.

 

Also for the record, I have this recurring fantasy of anally raping Ann Coulter while I slowly strangle her with an electrical cord and then I dispose of her nude body in a drainage ditch with several inches of stagnant water beside a state highway in Alabama. I know this says a lot about me, principally my dedication to public service, but I’m not trying to pretend to be some sort of hero; I just can’t stand the hateful and vindictive shit that comes out of some people’s mouths. I am also not sure why Ann Romney is not at home with her sister-wives raising up a passel of young’uns instead of regaling the assembled faithful with her utopian vision of an America where all wealthy white people can live in harmony and freedom, but what do I really know, after all? For example, I don’t know what the hell George Washington intended when he wrote the Magna Carta, but that was a long time ago. Back then, a slave was three-fifths of a person and gasoline was a penny a gallon. People went to church because it was the only place to find a decent hook-up. Land was cheap and anybody who was willing to murder a few Indians could make a life for themselves. Nobody stopped you from beating your wife or smoking dope and the average life expectancy was two and a half years. Everybody had to build their own cold fusion reactors and we were a better nation for it.

 

It seems to me that the most consistent theme in Conservative rhetoric is the loss of something pure in American society. There is an almost obsessive desire to return to some unspecified but nostalgically perfect time or condition when America used to be a better place. A time when the individual controlled their own fate and we were all unified in our belief in God and country. The problem is, of course, that such a time never existed. For every great virtue of the past there are two horrible and intolerable conditions that have to be ignored. The irony here is that my Republican brethren are bigger idealists than I am. They actually believe in the perfection of humanity instead of the interminable struggle to hold back the darkness. Their idea of perfection may be a little on the Third Reich side, but it is not unusual for people to long for a society where there is no conflict, everyone agrees on important things and unpleasant displays of poverty or perversion are hidden away from decent folk.

 

So here’s my analysis. Mythology is parable and allegory, not history or law. The American mythology of our sainted Founding Fathers, the vision and charity of Captains of Industry and the simple, self-gratifying toil of the masses is all delusional shit. It is only valuable in the opportunity it provides us to aspire to be better people and a better nation. As the parade of lost souls at the Republican Convention continues to invoke God and wave the flag and talk about values, they are nothing more than Oprah’s Book-of-the-Month Club discussing some wonderful, inspiring novel they all just read. They are filled with a sense of longing for a world that never existed; sadly Bilbo Baggins and Harry Potter are just idealistic visions of resourcefulness and moral purity. Transforming those visions into reality is not a job for people looking behind them, nor is it a task for the intellectually limited or the culturally inflexible. Bibles and bombs and abortion bans will not fix what ails America, nor will a diminished sense of social responsibility or descent into the hallucinatory hell of unfettered capitalism. If the truth be told, I choose to avoid watching the Republican Convention not because I fear I will, in a paroxysm of rage, hurl something at my expensive flat-screen TV, but because I am a grown man and I fear the senseless sadness of it will make me cry.

Pussy Magic

Meet Todd Akin, a six-term Congressman from Missouri who aspires to replace Senator Clare McCaskill in the U.S. Senate. In his tenure as a Congressman, he has expressed some opinions and served on some committees. He has sponsored legislation to define rape as something like fucking a nun. He has a Master of Divinity degree. He doesn’t support the right to choose to have an abortion, but he does support the right to own a lot of guns and he supports the War on Terror. He likes Paul Ryan, but not in a gay way.

Congressman Akin feels that women who are “legitimately” raped have a greatly reduced likelihood of getting pregnant. This is because of some power that the female body has to reject the sperm of a rapist. Apparently a friend told him this. A friend who is a doctor. Probably a Doctor of Divinity. Undocumented, scientifically inaccurate supposition is an important currency of discourse with people like Todd Akin, and ignoring facts that contradict his previously arrived at conclusions is the foundation of his impish charm. According to an authoritative source which I shall not name because that would violate the rules of ignoramus debate, about five percent of rapes result in pregnancy. I don’t know if this calculation is adjusted for the rape of girls too young to conceive or the rape of men or of ladies past menopause, so a woman could have a greater chance than that of getting pregnant from a rape, unless their secret uterus magic kicks in. In all fairness to Congressman Akin, he did say he misspoke when he found that his comments had been distorted by the liberal media to make it sound like he was an idiot. I respect people who abandon their unpopular principles.

If Congressman Akin were just some ambitious, ignorant megalomaniac shit-ass spouting voodoo nonsense to appeal to the mass of superstitious, retard voters in some backwater, inbred Congressional district, I wouldn’t really care. There will always be shit-holes in America, because freedom and genetic diversity provide for it, but this guy wants to be a Senator and represent the great State of Missouri, wherein lie St. Louis and Kansas City and about six million people; and the true shame of it is that he still has a reasonable chance of doing exactly that.

In 15th Century Europe they burned women for being witches; our sainted Pilgrim forefathers hung women a couple of centuries later for the same offense. It is always women who are getting blamed for freaky shit, usually unmarried women and more often than not, young ones. My theory is that some men are not handling the transition to civilization very well and they can’t get down with the fact that a woman can control the use of her own pussy. That pussy is pretty fucking enticing, and it sucks when you want some and the bitch blows you off. We men can’t understand why that pussy is so fucking irresistible; it must be the work of the devil because it makes us do stupid shit like buying houses and fist fighting our best friends. Ultimately, we resent the fact that we are slaves to pussy and of course we can’t blame ourselves, so the pussy’s owner must be the culprit. You evil, seductive bitches are responsible for this fucking mayhem. Sluts.

The sad truth is that in America we still have primitive minds, male and female, that wish to explain away violence against women as a consequence of nature and not a conscious choice on someone’s part to be a fuck-stick. When Mr. Akin misspoke, what he clearly meant to say was that if you weren’t a skanky whore who deserved to be raped, then God would probably not force you to carry a child you did not conceive out of love as a punishment for your skankiness. Since you can only “legitimately” rape the pure, all you promiscuous slatterns brought this crap on yourself, and we shouldn’t let you escape your well deserved penance by allowing you an opportunity for an abortion, or the status as a victim. What Congressman Akin is trying to say is that you fucking women are less than fucking human and should be treated like fucking animals, and if you allow medieval piss brains like him to get elected, you will be.

Citizens United, Perhaps

One-hundred and three days until the November 2012 elections and everything has settled into a predictable pattern. Unlike the 2008 election cycle when Barrack and Hilary were wedgying each other down to the wire, and John McCain was trying to re-learn how to smile, the nominees of the two relevant political parties have been obvious for some time, which has allowed them to go full bore with expending the gross national product of several South American nations trying to convince us what a turd the other guy is.

The role of money in political campaigns is an issue that is almost as old as the nation itself. Somebody had to pay for the hay for Washington’s horse as he rode around fathering the nation. The National Archives are replete with posters opposing Free Silver, supporting the Kansas-Nebraska Act and making fun of Millard Fillmore. Somebody had to pay for that stuff. There has never been a time in human civilization when the wealthy and the powerful didn’t have a disproportionate influence on the development of public policy.

The difference today is the sad reality of who the wealthy and powerful are. A thousand years ago, if you wanted to be the Viking king, you had to at least kick ass on a few dozen big, hairy Vikings and be able to hold your liquor. People listened to you because they knew you would smack them with the broad side of a battle ax if they didn’t, but they also knew that you would kick ass on any unwelcome invaders and that you would bring home the booty. The Viking king would be among the first to die if shit went south; he had not just authority but responsibility and accountability. Certainly he had privilege, but he had earned it by what he contributed to society. Even the 19th Century Robber Barons, with all their unethical and exploitive practices, actually accomplished something positive. They built railroads and steel mills and ships and factories. They got obscenely rich, but their objectives were almost never purely wealth; they had visions and dreams. They may have squashed a lot of decent, hard-working people along the way, but the nation got something in return, including a fresh understanding of how much it sucked to be exploited, which led to 20th Century liberalism.

Wealth in present day America is real mixed bag, but the super-wealthy tend to have one thing in common; they haven’t done shit for anybody, except perhaps their shareholders. The typical billionaire is either an inheritor living off the genius of past generations, has made their money speculating in commodities and stock markets, got rich charging you $30 for every bounced check, or earned hundreds of millions of dollars laying Americans off and exploiting Chinese peasants. While these may be gross and unsupportable generalizations, I am firmly committed to them being correct. There are, of course, always exceptions. Bill Gates, for example, is fabulously wealthy because he transformed civilization as we know it, for better or worse. Interestingly, people who have acquired great wealth through invention and initiative appear to be more likely to use their wealth for positive social change and addressing the needs of the unfortunate, unlike the Koch brothers.

Heaven forbid that we have any class warfare in our classless capitalist utopia, but I just think that if we are going to have people using unlimited wealth to promote political points of view, that it would be nice if they actually knew something or cared about something besides their own economic benefit. Freedom is not any guarantee of quality and no rules or laws are likely to protect us from the cold reality that some pigs are more equal than others, but if we start demanding that people have actually done something worth a shit before we pay any attention to their braying, then things might make a little more sense. As always, we Americans are masters of our own destiny to the extent that we choose to be. We don’t need the Supreme Court to protect us, and they won’t anyway.

It's not the heat, it's the Stupidity

It was hot when I got up this morning. That is probably not completely unusual since it is normally hot in Florida in July, always compounded by the insufferable humidity, but it started me thinking about how hot it has been everywhere for the past few years and why America is no longer capable of exercising productive leadership in the world. “What!?” you say. “Huh?” you reply. Well, I’m having a little internal dialog about global warming and how our treatment of the issue reflects a larger problem with American society.

Climate science, like much of our knowledge of the natural world, is complex. The earth’s climate is affected by a diverse set of variables which range from various cycles of the sun to behavior of ocean currents to the chemical composition of the atmosphere. There is debate about the future of the earth’s climate precisely because it is a complex scientific issue, and complex scientific issues are not generally the province of the untrained layman. Some of you may recall the chewing gum commercial where four out of five dentists recommended a particular brand of gum. This was judged to be effective advertising because the chewing gum company figured dentist ought to know what you should be putting in your mouth and if a significant majority of them thought a particular product was preferred, the buying public would consider this good enough for them. They never said what the fifth dentist preferred, or what his reasoning was, but it was accepted that when experts disagree, you are better off going with the majority opinion. One might term it a sort of intellectual democracy, with the key difference that only people who have legitimate qualifications get a vote.

The current debate on global warming tosses this accepted concept in the dumpster. Fully 95 percent of qualified climate scientists, qualified being having reasonable education and experience in the in the subject area, agree that the Earth’s average temperature is increasing. Perhaps three-quarters of them are in agreement that at least some of this increase is attributable to human action. Almost all of them agree that global warming, if occurring, will have a dramatic impact on human civilization. As with everything from evolution to the theory of relativity, there is dispute among intelligent, qualified experts acting in good faith, and sometimes the lone voice crying in the wilderness is absolutely correct, but there is a reason they have that ask the audience life-line on Who Wants to Be a Millionaire.  I am not a qualified expert on the Earth’s climate and I will not attempt to debate the science, I just know that if I have a lump on my neck and I consult ten doctors and nine of them say have it removed, I’m having it removed.

Unfortunately, in America we have now largely abandoned respect for education and appreciation for the scientific process and have subordinated our policy decisions to the financial interests of the corporations that fund election campaigns and the strident voices of the extreme. Corporations have no children and therefore cannot reflect upon the moral responsibility we have for how we impact future generations and extremists tend to be either ignorant or emotionally defective, or both, and do not make good leaders. As a society, whether we are progressive, conservative or don’t give a shit, we have abdicated our civic responsibility to educate ourselves on the basics of how the world functions and to select leadership which is capable of understanding complex issues and which has the courage to be honest and make difficult decisions. We no longer trust any opinion except the ones that support what we already thought and we have convinced ourselves that legitimate scientific debate is just a proxy for promoting philosophical objectives. We are so fucked. It’s really sad.

America has probably never been the moral paradise that many nostalgically long for and we have entertained some pretty fucking stupid ideas over the centuries. I’m not saying that our current idiocy represents a dramatic turn for the worse, but we seem to have lost the spirit of inquiry that used to drive our progress. It appears we think we have it all figured out and there is no need to seriously reflect on issues anymore. Few people are curious about anything but the Kardashian’s sex lives. The tragedy of this is that we are approaching a juncture in mankind’s history where thoughtful consideration of our situation will be the only thing that stands between us and unimaginable suffering. My opinion is that if you can’t understand the cause of the heat, then stay the fuck out of the kitchen.

Paid Political Announcement

As I sit here today, I can well imagine President Obama hiding there in the Offal Office, confused, frightened and ineffective, watching in wonder as the besieging army of Republican Presidential candidates slowly burst into flames, one after the other, and collapse into piles of smoldering ignorance and hypocrisy. Like Moses, he probably feels the hand of divine providence as he is delivered from his enemies unto the Promised Land. Personally, I am not looking forward to another four years of Quisling compromise and forgotten principles, but since the viable alternatives are so heinous, I have no choice but to support the current President. I realize this is just the sort of copout that has ruined America, but sometimes you have to accept mediocrity to oppose evil.

The media hype machine has been working overtime to try and create some interest in the political pornography that is the Republican primaries. First it was Michele “Hypno Toad” Bachmann, the first truly mentally handicapable candidate in American history; then it was that venal, misogynistic idiot savant Newt Gingrich back from the dead like a protégé of Dr. Herbert West, and now we’re back to Mutt Romney, the self-made son of privilege who changes his colors so often that the chameleon and octopus are left gaping in wonder. Not since Commodus has a man had such a sterling career based upon nothing other than his father’s legacy. Mr. Romney says in his TV commercial that he will “never, ever apologize for America”, apparently even when we’ve totally fucked things up, so he’s clearly the sort of thoughtful, objective realist we need in these treacherous and difficult times.

I’m going to digress here to point out that Mr. Romney is a Mormon. Religion is such a sensitive subject in America, for a myriad reasons, that openly and honestly discussing it is almost taboo, but every candidate for President, Republican or otherwise, seems to want us to understand that they are people of faith, including Mr. Romney, so I think it is fair game for analysis. I have not had close personal relationships with many Mormons, but the ones I have known were uniformly sociable and agreeable people who eschewed unhealthy behaviors and obeyed the laws, so it would be impossible for me to fairly level any criticism against the adherents of Mormonism based upon personal experience. Because I have long been an adherent of the Marlboro and Jack Daniels diet plan, I don’t think I would be very well received among the Latter Day Saints, but they’ve never wronged me as far as I know.

Back during the dark days of my misspent youth, I and several of my hash-addled fraternity brothers were visited by a pair of young Mormon missionaries.  We received them politely and settled them into comfortable chairs and proceeded to have a discourse on the nature of faith, the possibility of true knowledge and ultimate reality of existence. We were not awarded a copy of the Book of Mormon at the conclusion of this discourse and at least one of the young missionaries may have committed suicide shortly thereafter, but the upshot of it was that Mormonism didn’t appear to offer anything new or particularly revealing from a metaphysical perspective. Couple this with a secretive church bureaucracy that attempts to rewrite history to support myth and an institutional tendency towards mysticism, and Mormonism appears to be just as useless of the rest of organized religion. In fact, I think the worst thing that has ever happened to Western Civilization was probably when Theodosius I made Christianity the official religion of the Roman Empire in 380 A.D. This concluded the process of transforming the simple, humanistic philosophy of a filthy, sandal wearing socialist hippy into a political imperative and an instrument of state control. The Romans, cynical and crafty as always, absorbed the revolution that was challenging their legitimacy and hammered plowshares into swords to puncture enemies of the state and expand the Emperor’s dominion from this world to the world to come. From there, the magic underwear was clearly not far behind. Let me say, I truly admire the Romans; they set the standard for worship of power, wealth and privilege that has become the cornerstone of our civilization and the underlying theme of the Republican Party. What Jesus would have thought of this as he selflessly mingled with the lepers is anybody’s guess, but “Oh Goody!” doesn’t really come to mind.

Anyway, we are on the verge of another season of deliberate lies, distortions and misrepresentations, enhanced with honest mistakes of ignorance. I’m not sure it really matters which of the soldiers of the Army of Darkness emerges as the challenger to the President; he or she will almost certainly promote the interests of the wealthy over the needs of society and they will cloak themselves in the raiment of Christian humility and divine obedience while cashing checks from the Aryan Brotherhood. It’s really quite enough to make one want to puke. It would be pretty entertaining if somebody like that spiteful, venomous insect Rick Santorum were nominated, but it is difficult to imagine that even the Republican base could be so lacking in intellectual discernment, though I can always hope. Our other fine Mormon candidate, John Huntsman, is really the only Republican running whose election would not force me to flee to Romania, but he has the support of the same number of Republicans who support Barrack Obama, so his nomination is not likely.

We humans are a fine mess. Simultaneously dangerously clever and dangerously ignorant, we believe that some angry phantom created the universe and doesn’t want us to masturbate. We assemble by the billions in places of divine worship throughout the world and then sally forth and bash each other’s heads. Here in America, we tattoo “Freedom!” on our asses and then let those selfsame asses be groped by total strangers in airports while our elected representatives pass laws that allow the government to listen to our phone conversations when we complain about the groping. Every so often we have the opportunity to correct all this nonsense by putting reasonable people in positions of power to exercise the collective authority of “the people” and preserve human dignity and freedom, but instead we elect self-interested sociopaths, deluded messiahs and cowardly lions. Fuck if I can figure it out.