Rants: Why Trump Will Win

The average American does not really believe that the government is "of the people, by the people, for the people." Neither, though self-identifying as "Christian," does he believe that Jesus is God, or that there actually is a personal God. The average American is, in truth, a nihilistic wanker, whose main interests are, in order of priority, a bellyful of sugary, salty "food" and a head full of phantasmagorical, Hollywood-produced garbage and intoxicants. Trump has got it made.

Rants: Against the Dying of the Light

Below are a few random realizations, perhaps brought on by the winter solstice:

War:

It is only the atrocities that get the job done.

Witnessed:

A cult of closeted sodomites (and worse), publicly denouncing sodomy.

Thicker Than Water: 

The idea that I legitimately need, or am in any way entitled to, a modicum of emotional support is exposed as delusional by the annoyed indifference of those who are best positioned to know.

New Year's Resolution:

While I am pants-down-ankle-grabbing I will bravely whistle "God Bless America," no matter what happens...

Rants: The Current Rage

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The rant below is one of my comments in a thread at Vox Nova concerning the recent controversy over mandated birth control in health insurance coverage provided to employees at Catholic institutions, such as hospitals and universities. I first quote an excerpt from another readers' previous comment, and then launch into my own screed:

@ Henry Karlson –

“This is also something constantly forgotten when bringing up religious liberty: it is not just our religious beliefs that are in the nation.”

The fact that you even need to point this out, and the fact that the whole discussion of the issue is entirely pointless without this fact in mind, is precisely indicative of the type of Catholic exclusionary thinking of which I have been complaining with regard to the question of the closed communion.

If it is not possible to be a good Catholic in a secular and pluralistic society, then perhaps this is not the best society for Catholics to inhabit? I say this seriously. This nation was originally founded by Protestants. And the Calvinists (and other Protestants), against whom I continually hear some Catholics railing, founded it in order to be able to live according to their own beliefs.

Maybe the Church should just get out of the hospital business? I’m sure that for-profit corporations will buy them out. Maybe Catholics should not be running colleges and universities if they necessarily need to be employing non-Catholic staff who will want to live according to their own religious beliefs (or lack thereof?) Or maybe they need to shrink to whatever size a fully-Catholic staff will be able to support?

Nobody is asking Catholics to use birth control (although apparently they do so anyway.) Nobody is asking Catholics to have abortions. The idea that it’s fine and dandy to use medieval Scholastic verbal gymnastics such as “material cooperation with evil” to try to control – in very fundamental ways – the lives of non-Catholics, is just wrong. In this country, it’s wrong. And I’m not sure in what country it might be right. Can you think of one?
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Rants: I'll Say It Again

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OBAMA! GET OUT OF AFGHANISTAN

OR GET OUT OF WASHINGTON!

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Rants: Just About Had It

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NO SHORT-HAIRED, YELLOW-BELLIED SON OF TRICKY DICKY'S GONNA MOTHER HUBBARD SOFTSOAP ME WITH JUST A BUCKET FULL OF HOPE

$$ FOR DOPE

$$ FOR ROPE

~ John Lennon

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Rants: The Shirley Sherrod Incident

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The way this thing appears to be shaking down is that a malicious, racist landmine was set by a crypto-fascist disinformation operative, and the NAACP carelessly stepped on it, carrying the feckless Vilsap under one arm and chickenshit Barry Obama under the other. What a fucking mess. I'm howling with rage and convulsed with shame that this Breitbart scumbag was able to so easily pull off the same kind of shit that was pulled off in the demise of ACORN again, and so soon. What a nation of bleating merinos we are!

Never trust an American political conservative: they lack a fundamentally moral perspective.
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Update: Kudos to Tom Vilsac who has made a no-nonsense, straightforward apology to Shirley Sherrod and has offered her a new job. No "non-apology apology" here. This was good as gold. I can't ask for more--other than much better due diligence in the future.

Now: where the fuck is the White House? I'm waiting, Barry.

I. Can't. Hear. You....
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Rants: Bad News

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Over at Vox Nova, regular contributor Sam Rocha has posted a piece registering his disgust at the news. His post begins with the sentence, I’m sick of the “news.” And he concludes his reflections with, Sure, there are better and worse “news” outlets and we shouldn’t opt to live under a rock, but, in the end, the effect is the same for me today: nausea. How about you?

Well, since Sam asked, I made the following comments (very slightly amended here) in response:

What does it signify that reportage concerning events in “the news” is immediately susceptible to such a variety of slants, spins, analyses, and interpretations, both at the source (the media) and by its consumers (you and me)?

Is this because “the news” contains no Truth upon which you and I can agree? Or is it because you and I make use of the information conveyed to us through the media as raw materials, in order to construct the subjective pseudo-truths which serve to scratch our personal (and/or tribal) itches?

As a for instance, is President Obama taking heat over his response to the BP oil spill from many people because he is pro-choice, rather than because of his response to the BP oil spill itself?

As another, is organized labor in this country being systematically demonized and dismantled (despite its long history of struggle and sacrifice and its huge historical effect in raising everyone’s standard of living) because it has become somehow “unAmerican”; or is it primarily envy causing the rancor?

In short, do we now use news items primarily as brickbats to throw at the head of “the Other” rather than as reports on happenings in the world that may demand our attention as problem-solvers and agents of goodwill toward our fellow man?

Do we use “the news” primarily “against,” rather than “for?”

Do we seek out voices whose constant refrains are “con-,” rather than “pro-?”

All that negativity! No wonder we feel lousy!
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NB: Click here to hear Sam jam!
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Rants: WTF?

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Okay, I'll admit that I just don't get it. I mean, really -- how could squads of laser-guided underwater robots, armed with state-of-the-art diamond saws, so completely fail to accomplish a simple task that even Joe the Plumber -- despite the fact that his name's not really "Joe" and he's not really a plumber -- wielding only the primitive tools hanging on his belt... Oh. Wait...

....never mind.
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Rants: In It For the Money

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Stealing a neat gimmick from Kyle Cupp:


Memo to Dennis Miller: Not since Irma la Douce has there been a filthy ho as cute as you are, Cha-cha.
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Rants: Mary sí, Calvin no!

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At last look, an informal poll of the interests of readers at Vox Nova – Catholic Perspectives on Culture, Society and Politics, based on a tally of comments registered on concurrently active topics, renders these scores:

Transubstantiation: 13
Demonology: 20
Torture: 5
Gay Marriage: 106

The attitude of the Vox Nova readership towards demons is relatively laissez-faire (20); and more so for torturers (5). What, exactly, takes place with the Eucharist (it seems to be substantially a series of accidents) is mildly interesting (13). But a sizable percentage of them are damned-good-and-sure (106) that they don’t want those queers marrying and fucking up what has been, until now, a pristine-perfect institution. After all, what does the word “marriage” even mean, if it doesn’t mean compulsory breeding?

But what becomes apparent in an analysis the discussions cited above is that these folks generally don’t know what they mean. For example, the term “transubstantiation” dates from the 11th century and is still under dispute. The problem seems to be that Catholics are so good at scholastic finagling that they just can’t agree on the proper definition of any term: Bread? Wine? Body? Blood? Torture? Marriage? WTF?

That said, while it is quite clear that many of them are not too sure just exactly what they mean when they hold forth, many of them do know what they like. Or don’t like. (Mary sí, Calvin no!) Okay, then—whatever. Y’know?
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UPDATE: For the sake of accuracy, it should be noted that when I first wrote this piece I had apparently misread the total number of comments on Demonology as "2" when it had actually been--at that point--"20". Thus, uranists and demons have been firmly established as the Number One and (distant) Number Two category of critters preoccupying the minds of the interactive portion of the Vox Nova readership.
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Rants: Where Did Our Love Go?

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Perplexed about the recent ruling of the Supremes? Well, don't be: this isn’t complicated. It’s a matter of the super-rich asserting their right to control the political system of the country which they firmly believe they are mandated, by virtue of the wealth they generate, to rule.
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Ayn Rand lays it all out in her writings, particularly the novel, Atlas Shrugged.
XDemocracy, which empowers “the mob,” is antithetical to the philosophy of the plutocrats.
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Leona Helmsley once succinctly exposed the mindset of the super-rich; when charged with tax evasion, she reportedly uttered the classic line: “Only the little people pay taxes.” Well, you and I are “the little people” and lest there be any confusion on the matter, the Supreme Court has made it official.
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Get used to it. It’s going to get much worse.
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Rants: F*#k Lewis and Clark!

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Despite the funny money, the cacophonous jabber, and the totally weird shoes the bastards wear over there, I think that I’ve felt more “at home” in Western Europe than I have in the great American west. As a man of northern European (British, Scandinavian) blood, my soul tells me that the optimal human environment should be stony grey and sooty, cold, damp and crowded.

New Mexico, Arizona, Utah, California—all are too sunny and dizzyingly vast. The natives expose too much of their flesh. The clash of colors is enough to bring on migraine attacks. And surfer music was an aural scourge in the late ‘50s and early ‘60s similar to the horror that disco emerged as twenty years later. I’m serious, really—f*#k Lewis and Clark!

The west: polygamous Mormons and illegal Mexicans; canyons and cultists; Indian reservations and Aryan compounds! Aughh! The Trail of Tears, Ruby Ridge, Waco, and Charlie Manson...there’s no end to it.

The west is the natural habitat of Manny Ramirez. The east is Derek Jeter.

The west is Tim McVeigh. The east is the 9/11 first-responders.

Earthquakes, mudslides, wild fires, coyotes eating babies, freaking volcanoes for chrissake! The only category of natural disaster the west doesn’t have in super-abundance is floods. And that’s because they don’t have enough water; which situation will one day—mark my words—provoke the next civil war.

Let Texas (Gov. Perry) and Alaska (ex-Gov. Palin) secede, and take the rest of their pickup driving, yippy-i-oh-ti-yay neighbors with them.

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Rants: Making a Federal Case of Health Care

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The following consideration of the constitutionality of a proposed national health care system was originally composed in the comment section of Kyle Cupp's excellent blog, here. I am an advocate of a fully-nationalized, single-payer health care system. I think that to question the half-assed compromise system that is currently before congress on constitutional grounds is a joke and a diversionary tactic, being promoted in defense of corporate profits at the expense of the general welfare of the citizenry. That said, please consider the following:

The Preamble to the U.S. Constitution states that its purposes are the following: ...to form a more perfect union, establish justice, insure domestic tranquility, provide for the common defense, promote the general welfare, and secure the blessings of liberty...

I believe that ensuring access for all citizens, regardless of their ability to pay, to live-saving and life-enhancing health care fits nicely into the category "promote the general welfare." I believe that a national health care system is every bit as constitutionally sound as providing for the common defense. Is not defense against disease as important to the individual citizen as is defense against foreign or domestic enemies? Is it not, in fact, very likely to actually be much more important in the life of almost all citizens?

Much of medical research is funded by tax dollars. Why, therefore, should there not be equal, and guaranteed, access to the fruits of that science for all citizens?

I don't see the problem here. If a national health service, in which the government actually employed the health care providers were being proposed, the argument against it might be stronger. But that is not the case. The only difference here would be in who is writing the checks to pay for the services.

Government agencies are answerable to the people through their elected representatives. Insurance corporation bureaucrats are answerable only to their boards of directors and their shareholders. And what those entities are demanding of them is not good health care, but good profits. You do the math.
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Rants: Built on Sand

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All one needs to do is criticize Pres. Obama*--no matter how unfairly, and upon whatever petty, nitpicky grounds--and the mouth-breathing droves of clueless goobers and bleating merinos come marching forth in drooling, lockstep droves, chanting the talking-point du jour in the best approximation of unison that they can muster in their immeasurable incompetence. Send in the Clowns.

If such as these are the foundation of our democracy, this building has not much longer to stand.

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*See comment threads following the posts "Open Thread" and "Presidential Disconnect" (Friday, November 6th)

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Rants: It's Only a Game?

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World Series, Game One:

Instead of trotting out one wounded vet, with a missing left hand, to throw out the first pitch right-handed, why didn't they truck in a couple hundred of the brain-damaged vets in their diapers and bibs to show us what the war is REALLY like?

Liars! Propagandists!
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Rants: Sound the Tocsin!

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Awake! There are lies to tell, goods to covet, duties to shirk, beauties to defile, vows to break, myriad opportunities to utter "I am."
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Rants: Howling in the Desert

The cyber-sphere has struck me as sort of low-energy lately. The blogs I have frequented in recent years have been either sluggishly active, or have seemed thematically repetitive and unoriginal. Or both. Several have simply become defunct.

Looking for an antidote, I have in recent days experimented with both Facebook and Twitter. For Twitter, I’ve found no use at all; it seems largely to be a net for spam. Visiting Facebook, on the other hand, amounts to self-imposed cruel and inhuman punishment. Imagine entering a room to find dozens tone-deaf individuals, all singing Cielito Lindo off-key, but not in unison: I-I-I-I, mira me, amigo. Got the tune in your head, you gringo putz?

Maybe it’s me.

Along the same lines, as I write, I’m listening to the new Dylan CD, Together Through Life--a string of ten tunes almost all of which are about going alone through life. Go figure. These new tunes sound pretty much like the old tunes on his last CD, though not as good.

But, maybe it’s me.

I recently pulled off the shelf my dusty paperback copy of The Portable Beat Reader, edited by Ann Charters. In her introduction, Charters writes of the seminal launching—the money shot—of “the Beat Generation” that was Allen Ginsberg’s reading of his poem “Howl” at the Six Gallery in San Francisco:

The “Six Poets at the Six Gallery” reading was the catalyst… Michael McClure later described the atmosphere he felt the night of the reading in 1955:

We were locked in the Cold War and the first Asian debacle—the Korean War… We hated the war and the inhumanity and the coldness. The country had the feeling of martial law. An undeclared military state had leapt out of Daddy Warbucks’ tanks and sprawled over the landscape. As artists we were oppressed and indeed the people of the nation were oppressed.
…We knew we were poets and we had to speak out as poets. We saw that the art of poetry was essentially dead—killed by war, by academies, by neglect, by lack of love, and by disinterest. …We wanted voice and we wanted vision…

Ginsberg’s “Howl” delivered the necessary “voice” and “vision” on October 7, 1955, with the now famous opening words, “I saw the best minds of my generation destroyed by madness, starving hysterical naked, dragging themselves through the negro streets at dawn looking for an angry fix…”

It seems to me this morning that America in the mid-1950s, as described by Michael McClure, is not that different from the America that I’m walking around in today. But where the fuck is our Allen Ginsberg? When is he coming?

I was just a bit too young, in 1955, to be aware of the cultural ripple-effect caused by “Howl” and augmented by the publication of Jack Kerouac’s novel On the Road two years later. But by the year Nineteen Fifty-Nine, when I was a kid attending middle-school in Middletown, U.S.A., I had become aware of the “beatniks.” Maynard G. Krebs had become my favorite TV character. I was a beatnik before I was ever a long-haired counter-cultural freak.

The questing elements of my father’s generation had their cultural-spiritual-artistic renaissance in the Beats; mine had its own high-energy reawakening in the ‘Sixties phenomena of political activism, John Coltrane, Miles Davis, LSD, the Beatles, the Stones, Dylan, et al. If anybody sees anything comparable happening now, please turn me on to it.

The avant-garde artiste of today seems to be a bionic man; a hybrid of man and machine—his output computer-generated. What this means, if you boil it down to the stark essentials, is that the artist is the captive and the frigging tool of the (shudder!) corporation. I don’t see any good coming of that Faustian deal.

So, to sum up: the perpetual war rages on (this time in the Middle-East); we still have the political oppression, enduring which we sit hunkered-down on the hot sands of a spiritual desert, imperfectly shaded from its blazing sterility by an umbrella of compulsive consumerism, enhanced by an addictive dependence on “entertainments.”

And now I ask: how can an "artist" who is tethered to a corporate machine by a digital chain advance the cause of human freedom?

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Note: All of that said, in the background, from the soundtrack of my life, I can hear the Shirelles singing: Sha-la-la-la-la-la-la-la, Baby, it's you...

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Rants: ECON 101

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How do we know that America is a Land of Wonder? We know that America is a wonderland because only in America could one man--a rather eccentric man like Rep. Barney Frank--single-handedly destroy an entire multi-trillion dollar economy!

All by himself, Rep. Frank was able to entice the legendary Adam Smith to drop trou, grab his ankles, and moan through bitten lips, while Rep. Frank formed the Invisible Hand into a fist and shoved it up Adam's ass, all the way to the elbow. And all to get the Willie Robinson family out of that nasty, vertical, inner-city ghetto and into a modest bungalow in the horizontal ghetto on the wrong side of town.

If only Willie could've paid the vig!

As I said--Only in America!
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Rants: Too Good to Fail

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Last night it struck me--struck me right below the belt--as I sat hunched before the tube, unenthusiastically watching the political talk shows while eating my evening meal, how many of the commercial spots were for banks and investment firms. Even now. Even now.

The fat cats having already gobbled up the lion's share of whatever we had, the hyenas, the carrion dogs, and the vultures are now circling in to feast on the tatters and the bones, ravenous for marrow.

This, my friends, is your revered self-regulated Capitalism at play on the vast savannahs of the Free Market. The jagged snout you now feel pulling your intestines out of your newly-enlarged asshole is that of the frisky puppy you begged Santa for as an unquestioning and idealistic child, resting safe and secure on star-spangled lap of an Uncle (can you believe it?) too fucking GOOD to fail.

Too good to fail, because under the protection of Divine Providence. O, y-a-a-s, brother! Protected by an approving--and grateful--Deity from the common fate of the French and all those other foreigners--like Biafrans and, uh, Chechans and shit.

But I've seen enough. And you've now heard enough. Back to books then. I am currently reading:

2666 by Roberto Bolano (the last of the five books)

Pleasing Myself - from Beowulf to Philllip Roth by Frank Kermode

Nietzsche: Volume I - The Will to Power by Martin Heidegger

Collected Poems of William Empson

The Royal Beast and other works by William Empson, edited with an Introduction by John Haffenden

The Gnostic Religion by Hans Jonas

This last book is particularly appropriate reading at this time, because it offers a dualistic explanation of human existence which seems to jibe particularly well with those events we read about in the New York Post and watch remote shots of on the Fox News Network. To state it in the simplest terms, the gnostics point out that Man is holding the shit end of the cosmic stick.

That said, I point out that, if you are not already reading these books, too--or other books of their general ilk--then the chances are excellent that you are spending your idle time listening to Rush Limbaugh, or Chris Matthews, or Sean Hannity, or Keith Olbermann, or other intellectuals of their general ilk.

But, hey--it's okay: Jesus loves you.
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Reflections: Problems with Paradigms

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The following little rant was born as a comment to a thread at Ragged Thots in which it was suggested that, while the GOP has been characterized as "the stupid party," the Democrats can be designated as "the evil party." Below, slightly enhanced, is my response:

Actually, as I have tried over time to point out, the GOP, as the incubator of "conservatism" and "free market" piracy, is a coalition of the stupid and the evil, with the evil pounding cadence for the slow. The primary characteristic of Democrats has been futility. They see occasional glimpses of where they need to go, but their attention span fails them. They become distracted like toddlers trying get from one side of a room full of toys to the other.

Our captialist System is built on greed and greed is a poison. Once it builds past a certain tolerance--a tolerance that nobody seems to be much interested in monitoring--the organs of that System begin to break down, to fail.

The Evil Ones say, "So what? I will still get mine." The stupid ones are assured that although they've made irresponsible mistakes up til now, if they just turn their pockets out, take the wise counsel of the Evil Ones, and from this point on do it right! everything will be hunky-dory again soon. The truth is, there is no way to "do it right" for any extended period of time, when the paradigm is built on scheming, lying, and the leveraging of power--all juiced by greed. Yet this is the Republican Way.

The Democrats, by contrast, occasionally show signs of an urge to grope and stumble, feebly, in another direction. But as I say, in the global Round Robin as it currently exists, you have three teams to choose from: Evil, Stupid, or Useless. With which do you identify?

Sign here, kid.
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