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.
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