Baby, It's Old Outside

The reason Fairytale of New York is far and away the best Christmas song ever is simple:  it is a song about maintaining hope even when you know better. That's the "Christmas spirit" in a nutshell.

That sounds cynical, but it actually the opposite of the hopelessly cynical, crass commercialism that infests the holiday and most of its entertainment offerings, which range from the utterly sappy to the winking, knowing we're all full of shit here, guys! spoofs.

And perhaps nothing is more cynical these days than this new and ugly "tradition" of finding some ginned-up story or bullshit cultural artifact as prima facie evidence of a "war" on Christmas. Like Black Friday, it actually starts around Thanksgiving, and truckles on in some form until the end of the year.

At least with Black Friday, you get the twin pleasures of discount electronics and beating up strangers. This other thing is just another in the endless series of imaginary grievances wielded by fist-shaking codgers and barely-employable widget-stampers who are still trying to figure out why no one's rebooted The Dukes of Hazzard.

This nation has become utterly boring in its incessant whinging, in its myopic focus on jabbering nonsense, while the planet's climate is self-destructing, and Central American children are paying with their lives for the high crime of seeking asylum from carnage. The average workin' 'murkin busts their fat ass for just enough to get by, and is one medical catastrophe or job layoff from the sidewalk. Our health-care system, like the Holy Roman Empire, is none of those three words; instead it's an open conspiracy by rentier capitalists to overcharge and underserve, to transfer money from the working poor to the already wealthy.

Promises Made, Promises Kept

Just what you always wanted -- yet another Cletus safari culminating in a Festivus "fuck 'em" profile. Despite the completely predictable quotes and observations and outcomes, it's still worth a read, if only to demonstrate clearly just how members of a cult process information and function in their lives of futility and acquiescence.

The more recent nature of the New Yorker article (the author visited the plant in November) can't capture the near-daily unraveling since the midterm elections, so maybe some of these folks have changed their minds, seeing as how they're facing a welfare Christmas because of their feckless leader's stupefying ignorance on every possible subject. But even leaving that aside, they're fine with everything he's done so far. We all get that no one wants to admit they've been conned, that for every schmuck that actually goes on teevee to lament how they got suckered by some obvious catfishing scam, there's a dozen or more that will never admit it, but Jesus H. Christ. The people at this nail factory need to be deprogrammed.

Considering that their $11.50/hour jobs are about to disappear, and they'll be competing for new work with the people who lost their jobs at the nearby Briggs & Stratton facility, the only thing that has a chance of deprogramming them is reality jamming one way up their asses and snapping it clean off.

GOP Delenda Est; Or, Season's Beatings

During my teen years, I would travel downstate to Los Angeles for the summer, mostly to visit my father, but also several other relatives in the area. So an uncle and aunt in Downey, a cousin in Newport Beach, and so on. This was a time when "summer vacation" meant a full three months, early June to the week after Labor Day. So it was a week here, two weeks there, much more fun than sitting at home, broke and broiling in the punishing NorCal summer heat.

The Newport Beach cousin was (and still is) an avid surfer and guitar player, and close enough in age to where it was a lot like hanging out with an older brother who actually wanted you to hang out with him. So I would go on all-day surfing junkets with him and his USC buddies. I learned to enjoy and appreciate surfing, not just as a challenging physical activity (ocean swimming is not for the weak-willed), but as a meditative activity. The board becomes an extension of you, just by repetition; there are points where you imagine an overhead view of yourself, a tiny dot in a vast area of green and blue, land nearby but not conveniently so, possibly sharks or jellyfish or rocks lurking just below the surface.

The main thing about catching that proverbial wave is recognizing that the ocean is constantly moving, pulsing, surging, defying you to grab hold and find some rhythm. It's a beautiful and daunting thing, that existential challenge, one that forces you to simultaneously acknowledge your smallness, yet have the courage to jump into the endless motion and figure out a way to ride it to shore.

That's what the political news sphere feels like, more and more -- endlessly churning, surging faster and faster, defying us to find purchase, get a grip on this swirling narrative and make sense of it. In filing the Cohen and Manafort memos on Pearl Harbor Day (or Noam Chomsky Day, if you prefer), Robert Mueller may be hinting at a more sardonic sense of humor than any of us might have supposed. Certainly this tapestry is unfolding to reveal what very well may turn out to be a case of treason rivaling that of the Rosenbergs or Benedict Arnold.

You certainly wouldn't put it past ol' Fuckface Von Clownstick to sell West Point to one of Putin's bagmen. And now we are getting a clearer picture of how he literally sold American foreign policy, not to mention its electoral integrity, to a nation he is deeply in hock to. The people who are still denying what's plain for all to see are either on the payroll, or permanently drunk on the Kool-Aid.