Deus Ex Mockina

Recently on one of the milliard satellite content vessels, the feel-good classic Grizzly Man was broadcast, so of course I was compelled to watch. If you haven't seen it, I can't recommend it strongly enough; if you have, you know the magic of it. One of the main takeaways for me has always been the rather mundane observation that perhaps Disney, with its endless permutations of friendly animals that are, in real life, quite deadly and indifferent to your human concerns, has fucked up the minds of several generations of simpletons.

That's simply a circuitous path to saying that people are incredibly skilled at developing teleological viewpoints through which to view the world and how it works. Inevitably it comes down to them viewing and interacting with the world while encumbered with the baggage of their expectations of how the world should work. Like the unfortunate Timothy Treadwell from Grizzly Man, such people have an unrealistic view of how things really are. They are fine so long as their existential bubble doesn't clash overtly with reality, but the moment that it does is, let's say, rather clarifying.

And so you could graft that perspective onto the viewpoint of whatever remaining holdouts there are at this point, those hardheaded doofuses who are still convinced that 'murka's hallowed institutions will save the day.

The announced retirement of Anthony Kennedy simply underscores the entire miserable track record of Kennedy's SCOTUS tenure. He is and always has been fucking terrible, a preening, showboating Hamlet of a judge, concerned more than anything with casting the deciding vote on any given case. He will not be missed, and it's interesting and fitting that Kennedy has chosen to blow up what legacy he had, so unceremoniously.

(And now we suddenly are apprised that Kennedy's son Justin is a Goldman Sachs alum who has been Clownstick's fucking loan guy at Deutsche Bank. I don't know what's more ridiculous -- that yet another plot point has surfaced that would have been flat rejected by any copy editor as too preposterous, or that none of our intrepid media could have been bothered to ferret out this salient detail, I don't know, during the fucking election campaign? Sorta puts Bitch McConnell's decision to shorten Congress' summer recess in a different light, doesn't it?)

Which brings us to a third and broader popular teleology -- the idea that things will work out in the end. Frequently this is phrased as the warmed-over Martin Luther King quote about the moral arc of the universe being long, but bending toward justice. I would counter that with the classic J.K. Galbraith quote that in the long run, we're all dead.

Just as importantly, things don't always work out. History is littered with tales of valiant striving that was quashed by evil, unstoppable brutality, with no recourse. That "moral arc" shit doesn't work for me; I am not particularly concerned with where my fifth-generation descendants wind up, except insofar that they pay attention at all times and fight when necessary.

And I would put those two relatively simple skills forward as essential to the body politic. Do you want change? Do you despise the motherless fucks running the show right now? Then pay attention at all times and fight as necessary. That is all, but that is a lot, once you break those things down.

People are getting ready to protest, and this is bound to be an interesting summer for that reason. People will get hurt, possibly killed. I would suggest that there is a better way, that will hit harder, and produce no physical casualties. If you identify the biggest offenders and boycott them accordingly, they will squeal, I promise you. An organized boycott of Fox's various networks or Mark Burnett's various "reality" shitshows will produce far more value than a billion pussy hats.

Just don't fall for this shit that people are essentially good, and things will work out. They aren't, and they won't. There is an understandable undercurrent of anger in this country right now, and it will only be exacerbated as the tariffs start kicking in next month, and assholes start losing their jobs over the summer.

A smart, adaptable political party would capitalize on that anger and create momentum. Instead we have the Democrats trying to tone-police each other and make sure everyone's civil while the fucking ship is sinking. Well, as grandma used to say, fuck that shit.

No one is coming to rescue you. The bears are not your friends. Barry O is not going to save the day. The careerist limp-dick mediots are mostly useless. If you feel like the pigs currently at the trough are genuinely a threat to the country and its institutions, then maybe it's time to act like it. Develop a sense of urgency and insist that your elected representatives do the same, or they can go out and find honest work.

The Deal of the Art

Dave Eggers has a piece in the Fuck the Fucking New York Times that illustrates the rather obvious point that, among countless other things, one distinguishing feature of this metastasized tumor of an administration is that it has virtually no relationship with the world of the arts. There is much comparison with previous admins, and (surprise!) they are not favorable.

I covered this particular subtopic several times during the campaign and after the election, but it's been a while, and Eggers never quite gets around to the real issue. No doubt there's a shortage of artists who would be caught dead within a thousand yards of these scumbags, but there are plenty of washed-up miscreants who would jump at the chance to perform like dancing monkeys for the amusement of the emperor.

Comedians (or rather, "comedians") such as Rob ("Who?") Schneider and Tim ("Crybaby Narc") Allen have been outspoken in their support of this fucking failure of a roughly human-shaped object. And there's always Kanye West, who would never miss an opportunity to show up anywhere he and an interlocutor could suck each other off and pretend they're not completely useless.

It should be clear by now that Fuckface Von Clownstick is a perhaps uniquely empty vessel. Even his yokel fanbase, who would rather shoot themselves than read a book, do at least listen to music and watch teevee shows and movies. They might be bottom-shelf Honey Boo Boo / Duck Dynasty crap culture artifacts, but they're something. Normal people have things that they enjoy, whatever others' subjective opinions of those things might be.

So far the only people remotely associated with the creative arts who have been anywhere near the White House are Ted Nugent and Kid Rock. Does anyone seriously think that the fucking guy could name a single song from either of them? The only reason he knows who they are is because they vocally support him.

Clownstick literally does not enjoy anything that isn't about him, that doesn't function either as promotion or praise for him and his wondrous intellect and his heroic deeds. Real art requires effort from the consumer as well as the artist; the person enjoying the art has to be willing to concede at the door that the art might illuminate something greater, either within the person or out there in the great wide expanse of the universe. It requires a sense of curiosity and wonder, joy and engagement.

Clownstick has none of those traits, because he long ago decided that since he was the ne plus ultra of all human existence, past, present, and future, the rest of the world has nothing to offer him but handjobs and slavish obedience. Nothing else matters, or even counts. Whether he is praising or complaining about artists and performers, it is always entirely contingent on whether they have been sufficiently obsequious to his greatness. This is nothing short of a mental disease.

Incidentally, it is also a characteristic that subliminally welds him to his yokel cultists. Clownstick is the epitome of the ugly American who waddles into the Sistine Chapel or Sacre Coeur in cargo shorts and Ed Hardy tee-shirt, looks around for a minute and shrugs, not seeing what the big deal is, and heads out to find the nearest Burger King. That's exactly who they are, and that's what they love about him.

And it's the deeper problem at hand:  when you have an empty, needy narcissist who literally believes in nothing but himself, who never has anything new to learn or experience and is never wrong about anything, there's nowhere to go but down. And he's taking all of us with him, whether we support him or rightly see him for the dementia-addled psychopath that he really is.

Here Is Your Civility, My Main Man

It would be a Christmas/birthday/blowjob turducken (in other words, highly unlikely to happen, but amazingly sweet), but one fervently hopes that if (and it's a big if, frankly; there are simply too many retards wasting this nation's oxygen anymore) these thieving nazi cocksuckers can be pushed out of office, that the fucking lamestream media tone police and their selective hearing get pushed out along with them.

Never let those scumbags forget -- they're the reason we're stuck with these assholes in the first place. Fucking boycott them, all of them -- the NY Times, CNN, Kanye West, anything that's been touched by the greasy fingers of Mark Burnett, everything with the name Fox on it. Fascists can't do it without corporate enablers.

It's about to get weird, folks. Mueller seems ready to start dropping some shoes, the nazi fucks are "celebrating" the anniversary of last year's tiki-torch park putsch in DC, and all the cultists are going batshit over Baghdad Barb getting her worthless, lying ass tossed from a restaurant. At the very least, it's long past time for the dogsbodies of this elected tumor to be made aware that they are no longer welcome among decent folk. They need to all spend long lives selling oranges at the freeway off-ramp. This is no longer negotiable.

And their mediot appletini thumb-sucking asshole contingent should be right there alongside them. They can tell each other all their fucking Cletus safari stories, because the rest of us are sick of their Bungalow Bill horseshit. Go find honest work, assholes.

One May Shun Blunder Clod

The immigration "policy" is, depending on who's saying what on any given day:  not a policy; definitely a policy; a good policy based on biblical principles; an indefensible policy crafted and enforced by perfidious demoncrats, who as the minority party could fix all this overnight, but are (because, did you hear, they're eeeevil) somehow, through imaginary numbers and the square root of negative-one, preventing the party that has a majority in both houses from crafting a more humane policy -- which, of course, does not exist, unless of course you like it, in which case Jebus wills it.

Got all that?

Look. Let's cut the shit. In a backhanded way, this monstrous policy, enforced by these utterly monstrous people, at least forces us all to confront and decide what we are, what we've become, and what we want to be. Either you support ripping toddlers from their mothers' arms or you don't. Either you think it's okay to give the parents a lie borrowed straight from the Nazis, that they're taking the kids to get a bath, in order to literally kidnap them, or you don't. Either you support keeping children warehoused in dog runs inside an abandoned Wal-Mart.... well, you know the song by now. Is there common ground to be found between these disparate groups of people? Didn't think so.

Some of the more emotional news folks have characterized these kids as hostages, and that oversells it a bit. Because hostage, even with its implications of compliance and subordination and victimization, still confers humanity. The hostages are human, that's what makes their captivity so tragic.

These children and their parents, on the other hand, are human only in the most technical sense. They are not hostages, they are bargaining chips. They are inert objects being used to trade for something useless that the emperor wants in order to puff himself up to his increasingly putrid base. They are tokens in a game being played by soulless bastards.

Just Us League

Short fiction piece, very rough, but I wanted to punch it out before the stupid theatre summit, the Bungle in the Jungle. There will probably be revisions over the next week or so.

---

The emperor boarded his plane with a scowl, in a fugue of anger and confusion. The convention with the other national leaders had not gone quite to plan. To the extent that there was a plan at all, it mainly consisted of variations on the classic theme of I talk, you listen and do what I say.

Usually the Euros and the Canadians just complied and went along, if for no other reason than force of habit. But somehow this time was different.

The Canuck was usually a polite little pussy. He even had a pussy name -- Justin. Justin. The emperor rolled it around in his brain for a bit, chewing on its sibilance and fricative, trying to think of something nasty that rhymed with it. That little prick.

The emperor sat in his plush seat on the jet, nodded to the servant to bring him his customary second lunch, and pulled out his phone to check the Twitter feeds. That gutless faggot Flake was at it again, talking big about the wrongness of it all. Whatever. Empty words. He'll get in line with McCain and Collins and the rest of those chumps. When push came to shove, all they ever did was talk.

Hearts Unknown

Just wanted to jump in from the (very brief so far) self-imposed hiatus to chime in a bit on today's sad news about Anthony Bourdain. I've mentioned before that I greatly enjoy Bourdain's writing and shows, and that has mostly to do with the humor and humanity that infused everything he did.

You could look at the career Bourdain had carved out for himself post-Kitchen Confidential, and rightly point out that he had been given the rare opportunity to literally design his dream job and live it, and be well-paid and highly-regarded for it. To travel anywhere he wanted and function essentially as a goodwill ambassador, and show the commonalities of people rather then the differences.

Everyone has to eat, and so it seems natural to bring people together over food -- and not high-dollar Michelin haute cuisine nonsense, but street food:  fast, greasy, tasty, the food that regular people with a modest amount of money in their pockets would eat. Sometimes Bourdain would add in rock bands that he enjoyed -- Queens of the Stone Age; The Sword -- and have lunch with them. The episode with Obama in Hanoi was especially poignant, and a wonderful moment for both men. Try to imagine the current....thing in the White House doing something like this. It's unthinkable.

Clearly Bourdain was a man of passions -- food, drink, music, politics. Certainly many of us can relate to such passions, and so can appreciate someone who (again) literally got to create his dream job around the things he was most passionate about. But there's always a price paid that no one else knows about.

None of us can know what's in someone else's head, obviously. I know that there have been times in my life when my passions could inflame, get maybe a bit past my control, to a point where you might be so passionate about something that you don't know what to do with it or how. You feel like your heart might just burst with all the energy and desire built up within.

Passion isn't always a voluptuous woman waiting for you; sometimes it's a tiger you figured out how to ride, but that you suddenly can't just dismount. Sometimes the world, in all its beauty and pain existing side by side, is too much, and all it takes is a moment to look into the abyss, and not look away in time. Take a moment to think about the people in your life, and reach out to them if they might be on the brink. If it's you that's on the brink, call someone, anyone. There is help, and it does get better. But you have to make that leap.

As disheartening and tragic as this morning's news is, there is a very small bit of comfort in seeing that, in the midst of the daily ugliness we all exist in these days, there was a large and genuine outpouring of grief for the loss of a good person, someone who was generous with his time and talent and position in life, even if he clearly wasn't entirely comfortable with those things. Rest in peace, Tony.

They Tried to Make Me Go to Rehab

Feeling like I need a political detox, and I feel like I say that periodically without following through sufficiently. A good night's sleep and we're back on that horse again, tilting at the same old tottering windmills.

The entire country has been doing this to some extent, of course, whether they are amateur scriveners like yours truly, or just bewildered passersby who don't record every stray observation in a futile attempt at catharsis. Poison has collected in our collective veins, and when we have no way of expelling it other than sputtering impotent virtual rage, it builds up in our systems. We build up a tolerance to it, even as it continues to infiltrate and destroy the organs.

So this time I'm not promising a hiatus. It might be forty-eight hours or a month. There are, as always, a few creative projects still loitering in the back of what's left of my mind. I've been reading (mostly non-political) books at a torrid pace, something like thirty since the beginning of the year, fiction and non-fiction. There are some short fiction ideas I may tease out in here, there are some music ideas I might go work on, the local school district is offering free Pro Tools engineering classes for the summer, which might be a fun diversion.

There are a couple of other creative and commercial projects in the hopper, some of which may be shared here. There will be some visual updates to this site, maybe more of a link overhaul as well. And there's always more physical exercise to be had, especially in response to a chronically bad back, which only gets worse with age, I can assure you.

Everybody Complains About the Weather, But Nobody Does Anything About It

Steve at No More Mister Nice Blog has a nice rundown of the antics of one David Bossie, a lifelong conservatard ball-gargler whose current preoccupation is sucking on the preznitential cheeto, if you know what I mean and I think you do.

Now, a reasonable person might look at Steve's meticulously itemized list of Bossie's nefarious, ugly antics in the service of pure evil and say, This asshole's been doing what he does for twenty-five years now. That's terrible.

Not being a reasonable person, I look at that list and think, Why has that motherless fuck been allowed to get away with this bullshit for twenty-five fucking years? Is there no one in the Democratic Party that has the guts to cut this asshole's Achilles tendon, politically speaking?

Seriously. It just reminds me of all the stupid lurid "Klintoon Body Count" lists that circulated among the then-nascent freeper conspiratard crowd. You had to wonder, If the Clintons are such Mafia-style badass killers, why haven't they at least professionally ruined certifiable morons like Newt Gingrich or Ken Starr, or the rest of them? They don't seem very badass to me.

And it's the same with David Bossie or Dinesh D'Souza or any number of these dipshit rabble-rousers who, however intellectually inept and bankrupt they are as human beings, still serve as ideological rallying points and rainmakers for the Koch and Mercer types who really own this country. Why isn't there a party mechanism to go after these guys, so that every time they come out of the woodwork, there's someone right behind them to remind everyone that they're intellectual goat-fuckers?

These animals have done incalculable damage to the fabric of this nation over the last quarter-century, at the very least by giving voice to the choir of wingnut-welfare insanity that bought out the working rubes for a few shekels, and sold them down the river on a raft of cheap "culture warrior" bullshit and "fambly valyews" claptrap.

Maybe if the Tom Steyer types, who think their bien pensant drives to impeach the emperor have value, instead put some of their pelf into supporting some countervailing "think tanks" and other such generators of ideological propaganda, we might not find ourselves here wondering why card-carrying mouth-breathers like Bossie and D'Souza are still in business after all these years.

At the Movies: Worthless Asshole Edition

In case you were wondering:  the only way I'll ever watch a Dinesh D'Souza movie is if it involves him putting a Mossberg in his diseased piehole and splattering his brain-pan across the nearest wall. In a world of useless, vile cocksuckers, D'Souza stands out -- or slouches out, anyway. Not only is he the true essence of scum, in the usual moral and conventional sense, but he's completely useless as a human being.

Even Roger Stone has held a job at some point, and had to add value to whatever sleazy concern he grifted from at the moment. But D'Souza is one of those true dirtbags who moralizes and preens to no end, while he cheats on his wife and fucks married women, outs gay college students, compares liberals to nazis, participates in election fraud, but never actually does anything useful.

This is another thing that has always annoyed me about Barack Obama:  the man was simply incapable of hating effectively, in the true strategic sense. Forget the paranoia about Nixon's "enemies list" or what-have-you -- if Obama had really made a point of dropping the fucking hammer on people who were asking for it (Joe Lieberman; Addison Graves "Joe" Wilson; D'Souza) he might have engendered some real fear and respect from Mitch the Bitch and his gang of traitors, and gotten more accomplished, instead of having his name and legacy erased in a year by a jism-crusted baboon smearing shit on the walls.

By letting those losers off the hook rather than making well-deserved examples of them, Obama showed himself as a light touch. And that's how you end up with an industry-written health-care reform bill that's mostly a legislative zombie these days, a stolen SCOTUS seat, and on and on. D'Souza should have had to push ass out of some New England hellhole like Walpole, where he would have been traded weekly around the cell block for commissary items. I'm not kidding or exaggerating at all, D'Souza's track record is something that any decent person would be deeply ashamed of. He's a fucking piece of shit.

Instead, he gets a high-profile pardon from Preznit Tide Pod Challenge, which has the triple effect of making a political point to the scum getting ready to roll on Orange Julius, trolling the libtards, and ushering the gutter worm back onto the conservatard radar, where he can once again collect wingnut welfare checks for his hacky little snuff films. I do hope Obama is enjoying his paragliding weekends with Richard Branson. When we needed someone to really fight, and drop ankle-biting turds like D'Isgrace D'Souza down a fucking hole once and for all, we got a patient, calm explanation in cool, professorial tones about why the fight was just and worthwhile.

Never again am I falling for this shit; I want a goddamned eye-gouging street fighter, someone who head-butts the opponent right in the nose, then leans in and goes Mike Tyson on the motherfucker's ear. All you Marquess of Queensberry fools lamenting the absence of decorum can sit right the fuck down, and go back to your accounting jobs or whatever.

Decorum is dead, they wheedled it into their windowless ice cream truck and raped and killed it, and we're not interested in resurrecting it until all the Pogo the Clown types on the other side have been dealt with appropriately and with real finality. I'm dead serious; I want their kids and grandkids to be completely unemployable.

Regardless of whether Fuckface Von Clownstick is impeached or resigns or gets another term, I have zero interest in returning to the gutless incrementalism and performative normalcy of the ambitiously cowed technocrats. The contradictions have been well and truly heightened, ferchrissake. The warning should be sent out to Democrats as well as Republicans -- fight or fuck off. Start bringing a gun to the gunfight for once in your worthless lives, because the other guys certainly are, every time.

To reiterate:  fuck that asshole. Like the rest of them, D'Souza needs to be crushed, made broke and powerless and away from any platform of influence. I hope we have a new generation of Democratic politicians coming in who quit persisting in delusions about "collegiality" with these traitors and thieves, and simply set about to the hard but rewarding work of ending them, of burning their careers and livelihoods to the ground and poisoning the earth beneath.