A thorough post-mortem analysis of the 2016 election will include the inevitable effects of reactionary sentiments, especially against putatively "progressive" causes that made the rounds in that year and the couple years preceding it. Some of this reactionarism certainly had its roots in racism, as the folks in the Black Lives Matter movement (insofar as it even qualifies as such) can attest.
Some of the working-class frustrations, whether real or cynically exploited by the Koch-Mercer-Murdoch axis of evil, had at least a strata of truth. Imagine someone out in the 'murka's vaunted heartland, town decimated by outsourcing, smart kids left and dumb ones stayed and impregnated each other, no prospects, no future, just the steady drip of generational dilapidation, punctuated by the occasional limp parade through town on the veterans' holidays, to remind of lost greatness and vigor. They've put up with this shit for some years, and are now watching those people riot, disrespect cops, and such like.
Now throw on immigrants collecting social services and squeezing out anchor babies, campus smart-asses jabbering about intersectional micro-grievances, and transvestites demanding restroom privileges, and Democratic politicians paying far more attention to such things than even mentioning (much less actually visiting and witnessing firsthand) the decaying Mayberries across the country. You can see where those folks might conclude that Something Had To Be Done, even if you completely disagree (as you should) that their chosen electoral action had any basis in operational reality.
In other words, people across the political spectrum can and should be able to see where people in many areas in the US might feel like their lives and communities are well and truly fucked, and their fat-cat pols are non-responsive. And yet they still should be able to see that electing a fake billionaire who apparently got a heart transplant from George Wallace might not be the solution to that set of problems.
It is perhaps the mark of a society that is collectively doing better than it thinks it is, when a sufficient number of people have the luxury to complain about micro-aggressions and triggering and the other inane jargon terms of the intersectional grievance claque. However, the corollary to that might be that you could say the same thing about a society that has the luxury of complaining about those complainers, especially when there are far worse challenges staring us all in the face.
There are the obvious big-picture transgressions:
I've been rereading some of what I wrote in the immediate aftermath of the election, and one thing from then that certainly holds up is that the defiling of the Oval Office with the likes of Fuckface Von Clownstick really is the political equivalent of 9/11, in that it has literally changed how everyone, regardless of political persuasion, thinks and perceives pretty much everything in that arena.
The mainstream media have mostly relegated themselves to covering the daily follies and outrages, sputtering in impotent perplexity that he keeps getting away with it. But they still show up dutifully to be lied to by Baghdad Barb, who makes no effort to conceal her contempt for them. And rightly so -- they have forgotten what their real mission is, and so the majority show up like pathetic dogs, waiting to get their heads kicked in by their abusive owner. It's painful to watch. Everything changed, but they have not.
What does all this have to do with the SJW types? Not much, really, except to point out that most reasonable people can agree that the bumptious PC nonsense spewing forth from the campus crusaders is frustrating at best, but mostly eye-rolling and obnoxious. The paucity of critical thinking, the herd mentality of political correctness, the reflexive squelching of opposing views, all contribute to a stifled orthodoxy that, as most people outside academia can tell you, will be beaten out of them by the real world almost the instant they hit the street. Anybody working an honest job does not have time to parse the nuances of intersectionality.
No, the real world has much worse issues, many of which have been thrown in sharp relief by recent events. The Parkland school shooting in Florida is a prime example. It is a mundane, now routine observation that the US is the only nation on the planet where this sort of thing happens, much less happens on a frequent basis that we have all become accustomed to.
What compounds this gruesome calculus is that we are now also the only nation where the survivors of such events are routinely attacked, mocked, lied about, threatened. It was awful enough when that fat fuck Alex Jones disseminated the idea that the parents of the second-graders murdered in their classroom at Sandy Hook were "crisis actors," people brought forth to perpetuate a tragedy that never happened, in order to engage in the fruitless, endless quest for even modest gun control.
Now we are picking on teenagers who have had the temerity to stand up for themselves and speak their minds. About the mildest reproach I have seen toward these kids is the notion that since a handful of kids roughly the same age have gained some YouTube notoriety doing the "Tide Pod Challenge," that entire generation is therefore disqualified from even opining on the complexities of law-abidin' gun fetishists.
I would suggest that for the past several years, this whole goddamned nation has been participating in an ongoing Tide Pod Challenge, ever since the day that ridiculous asshole came down the escalator and tossed his piss-colored wig into the ring.
The Parkland survivors, most of them still (barely) too young to vote (but you can be assured that they will), provide some measure of hope beyond the gun control debate itself. They are proving first and foremost that we don't have to take shit from the right-wing nutjobs and their hired scum. They are demonstrating the hypocrisy of the bloodthirsty NRA and its shills, especially the loathsome Dana Loesch.
The NRA does not represent gun owners, it represents gun manufacturers, and Dana Loesch is a paid spokes-tool. This is something I have pointed out in one-on-one conversations with my gun-owning NRA friends -- they think they are customers, but they are the product. The NRA is basically a gigantic mailing list, a market for the NRA's true customers -- that is, the manufacturers -- since most guns are now purchased by people who already own guns. This is a very powerful statistic that underpins the entire problem, despite all the distracting rhetoric about "culture" and whatnot.
It should not be a terrible thing for a group of crime victims -- kids who watched their friends and classmates and teachers get murdered by a psychotic ex-classmate with an AR-15 -- to collectively observe that it should be at least somewhat challenging for such a person to have access to a military-grade weapon. In a country where schools are notoriously underfunded and teachers underpaid, it is retarded to insist that the best solution is to invest money into turning schools into fortified citadels, and teachers into trained killers.
But most of all, the hypocrisy of paid assholes such as Loesch excoriating victims as somehow insincere or financially goaded into the stance they've taken, well, that should be completely unacceptable. But in three short years, this orange animal and his dirtbag failsons and the paid cockroaches who enable and support him, they have turned this country on its collective head, practically eliminated our ability to process disgust and outrage at things that used to require very little time to arrive at that destination.
When and if the US climbs out of the abyss we have collectively thrust ourselves into, there will be a great many things that will need to be repaired. Almost certainly, the first thing that will need to be done is to formulate a highly specific set of protocols prohibiting the chief executive, and their family and staff, from personally enriching themselves through their elected office. A blind trust will be truly blind, not a wink and a nod to the aforementioned failsons minding daddy's grift machine while he pretends to be in charge. You can't just send your knockoff-handbag-peddling daughter to a geopolitical flashpoint to conduct highly sensitive strategic negotiations regarding a country with which we are still technically at war, because you're too fucking lazy to appoint a proper ambassador to the region.
But more intangibly, and hence more difficult to reclaim, will be our capacity for cynicism, and the ability to translate that into action. The sheer mendacity of every one of these fucking people is exhausting. This is beyond mere policy disagreements -- they are vile humans, every last one of them, and they have taken up actively against the interest of their own country. They are nothing short of traitors, and one hopes futilely that some sort of justice will eventually find some or most of them.
In the meantime, maybe we focus on that which is in front of us and actually threatens us all. Again, the campus crybabies will find out soon enough just how little use the real world has for their grievances of privilege. There are too many academic types on the opposing ideological side who have a vested interest in stoking those differences, otherwise they'd have nothing to write about, and then might be forced to ply an honest trade.
But we have kids dying, adults bullying the survivors, a claque of scummy oligarchs undermining the fundaments of the republic, and media monkeys who can't find their own assholes in a dark room with both hands an a flashlight. It is now more important than ever for us all to keep our eyes on the ball.
Some of the working-class frustrations, whether real or cynically exploited by the Koch-Mercer-Murdoch axis of evil, had at least a strata of truth. Imagine someone out in the 'murka's vaunted heartland, town decimated by outsourcing, smart kids left and dumb ones stayed and impregnated each other, no prospects, no future, just the steady drip of generational dilapidation, punctuated by the occasional limp parade through town on the veterans' holidays, to remind of lost greatness and vigor. They've put up with this shit for some years, and are now watching those people riot, disrespect cops, and such like.
Now throw on immigrants collecting social services and squeezing out anchor babies, campus smart-asses jabbering about intersectional micro-grievances, and transvestites demanding restroom privileges, and Democratic politicians paying far more attention to such things than even mentioning (much less actually visiting and witnessing firsthand) the decaying Mayberries across the country. You can see where those folks might conclude that Something Had To Be Done, even if you completely disagree (as you should) that their chosen electoral action had any basis in operational reality.
In other words, people across the political spectrum can and should be able to see where people in many areas in the US might feel like their lives and communities are well and truly fucked, and their fat-cat pols are non-responsive. And yet they still should be able to see that electing a fake billionaire who apparently got a heart transplant from George Wallace might not be the solution to that set of problems.
It is perhaps the mark of a society that is collectively doing better than it thinks it is, when a sufficient number of people have the luxury to complain about micro-aggressions and triggering and the other inane jargon terms of the intersectional grievance claque. However, the corollary to that might be that you could say the same thing about a society that has the luxury of complaining about those complainers, especially when there are far worse challenges staring us all in the face.
There are the obvious big-picture transgressions:
- the piss-colored rosacea golem squatting in the people's house, profiteering illegally with impunity, sending his dipshit progeny to conduct sensitive high-level negotiations that hold countless lives in the balance;
- the steadily mounting evidence that a hostile foreign nation affected a US presidential election with the complicity of the victor and his campaign staff;
- a stolen SCOTUS seat;
- the Republican Party's rapid devolution into a proto-fascist enabling regime;
- the Democratic Party's typically dickless response -- these fuckers stole a Supreme Court seat and the election, and the only thing you assholes grandstand about is the so-called Dreamers?;
- the various cabinet ministers whose respective missions amount to killing off the agencies they have been appointed to oversee;
- the sizable minority that still supports such nonsense, directly counter to their own rational self-interest and that of the country they self-righteously claim to revere.
I've been rereading some of what I wrote in the immediate aftermath of the election, and one thing from then that certainly holds up is that the defiling of the Oval Office with the likes of Fuckface Von Clownstick really is the political equivalent of 9/11, in that it has literally changed how everyone, regardless of political persuasion, thinks and perceives pretty much everything in that arena.
The mainstream media have mostly relegated themselves to covering the daily follies and outrages, sputtering in impotent perplexity that he keeps getting away with it. But they still show up dutifully to be lied to by Baghdad Barb, who makes no effort to conceal her contempt for them. And rightly so -- they have forgotten what their real mission is, and so the majority show up like pathetic dogs, waiting to get their heads kicked in by their abusive owner. It's painful to watch. Everything changed, but they have not.
What does all this have to do with the SJW types? Not much, really, except to point out that most reasonable people can agree that the bumptious PC nonsense spewing forth from the campus crusaders is frustrating at best, but mostly eye-rolling and obnoxious. The paucity of critical thinking, the herd mentality of political correctness, the reflexive squelching of opposing views, all contribute to a stifled orthodoxy that, as most people outside academia can tell you, will be beaten out of them by the real world almost the instant they hit the street. Anybody working an honest job does not have time to parse the nuances of intersectionality.
No, the real world has much worse issues, many of which have been thrown in sharp relief by recent events. The Parkland school shooting in Florida is a prime example. It is a mundane, now routine observation that the US is the only nation on the planet where this sort of thing happens, much less happens on a frequent basis that we have all become accustomed to.
What compounds this gruesome calculus is that we are now also the only nation where the survivors of such events are routinely attacked, mocked, lied about, threatened. It was awful enough when that fat fuck Alex Jones disseminated the idea that the parents of the second-graders murdered in their classroom at Sandy Hook were "crisis actors," people brought forth to perpetuate a tragedy that never happened, in order to engage in the fruitless, endless quest for even modest gun control.
Now we are picking on teenagers who have had the temerity to stand up for themselves and speak their minds. About the mildest reproach I have seen toward these kids is the notion that since a handful of kids roughly the same age have gained some YouTube notoriety doing the "Tide Pod Challenge," that entire generation is therefore disqualified from even opining on the complexities of law-abidin' gun fetishists.
I would suggest that for the past several years, this whole goddamned nation has been participating in an ongoing Tide Pod Challenge, ever since the day that ridiculous asshole came down the escalator and tossed his piss-colored wig into the ring.
The Parkland survivors, most of them still (barely) too young to vote (but you can be assured that they will), provide some measure of hope beyond the gun control debate itself. They are proving first and foremost that we don't have to take shit from the right-wing nutjobs and their hired scum. They are demonstrating the hypocrisy of the bloodthirsty NRA and its shills, especially the loathsome Dana Loesch.
The NRA does not represent gun owners, it represents gun manufacturers, and Dana Loesch is a paid spokes-tool. This is something I have pointed out in one-on-one conversations with my gun-owning NRA friends -- they think they are customers, but they are the product. The NRA is basically a gigantic mailing list, a market for the NRA's true customers -- that is, the manufacturers -- since most guns are now purchased by people who already own guns. This is a very powerful statistic that underpins the entire problem, despite all the distracting rhetoric about "culture" and whatnot.
It should not be a terrible thing for a group of crime victims -- kids who watched their friends and classmates and teachers get murdered by a psychotic ex-classmate with an AR-15 -- to collectively observe that it should be at least somewhat challenging for such a person to have access to a military-grade weapon. In a country where schools are notoriously underfunded and teachers underpaid, it is retarded to insist that the best solution is to invest money into turning schools into fortified citadels, and teachers into trained killers.
But most of all, the hypocrisy of paid assholes such as Loesch excoriating victims as somehow insincere or financially goaded into the stance they've taken, well, that should be completely unacceptable. But in three short years, this orange animal and his dirtbag failsons and the paid cockroaches who enable and support him, they have turned this country on its collective head, practically eliminated our ability to process disgust and outrage at things that used to require very little time to arrive at that destination.
When and if the US climbs out of the abyss we have collectively thrust ourselves into, there will be a great many things that will need to be repaired. Almost certainly, the first thing that will need to be done is to formulate a highly specific set of protocols prohibiting the chief executive, and their family and staff, from personally enriching themselves through their elected office. A blind trust will be truly blind, not a wink and a nod to the aforementioned failsons minding daddy's grift machine while he pretends to be in charge. You can't just send your knockoff-handbag-peddling daughter to a geopolitical flashpoint to conduct highly sensitive strategic negotiations regarding a country with which we are still technically at war, because you're too fucking lazy to appoint a proper ambassador to the region.
But more intangibly, and hence more difficult to reclaim, will be our capacity for cynicism, and the ability to translate that into action. The sheer mendacity of every one of these fucking people is exhausting. This is beyond mere policy disagreements -- they are vile humans, every last one of them, and they have taken up actively against the interest of their own country. They are nothing short of traitors, and one hopes futilely that some sort of justice will eventually find some or most of them.
In the meantime, maybe we focus on that which is in front of us and actually threatens us all. Again, the campus crybabies will find out soon enough just how little use the real world has for their grievances of privilege. There are too many academic types on the opposing ideological side who have a vested interest in stoking those differences, otherwise they'd have nothing to write about, and then might be forced to ply an honest trade.
But we have kids dying, adults bullying the survivors, a claque of scummy oligarchs undermining the fundaments of the republic, and media monkeys who can't find their own assholes in a dark room with both hands an a flashlight. It is now more important than ever for us all to keep our eyes on the ball.
2 comments:
A cri de Coeur for sure, Heywood. Good to see you bad. Sad we have to have this topic (once again) to dissect.
While I agree with your assessment of the Trump administration and its enablers, it is wrong of you to attack those of us on campuses who are raising issues of intersectionality. Hundreds of years of racism, sexism, and homophobia in this country have crushed millions of people and the problem goes on unabated. It is a good thing people care about it and are addressing it. And yes, micro-aggressions are part of the problem that need to be addressed. If you think it's only bad when genocide happens, you're missing the lesson about how they start.
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