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.

The classic cliché of the frog in the pot of boiling water -- which of course isn't empirically true in the first place -- doesn't quite do justice to the ongoing national trauma, of watching a semi-literate cartoon character turn the nation's highest office into a blatant, rub-your-nose-in-their-shit profit center, while his fan club literally chants drain the swamp at him, like good cult members.

It's not that the water is gradually getting warmer without the frog noticing, it's that it's not water in the first place, but something more toxic, and the frog is merely absorbing it, more and more, and is now in that nether zone between lucidity and the inevitable slide into coma and death, recognizing the rising toxicity, and yet being completely unable to do anything about it.

True total consciousness, were it to be actually achieved, would be psychically debilitating. The Buddhists say that desire is suffering, and they're not wrong, but the same could be said of awareness. No wonder so many people would rather addle their brains with Real Housewives soma than get engaged. They know the game is rigged against them anyway, and the more you know, the more that knowledge becomes self-reinforcing.

Meanwhile, those who pay attention become inured to the daily ritual of abuse, which is its own kind of debilitation. The futility of watching endless corruption, of foul people raking in blood money, starts taking away the desires of the observers, who certainly had hopes and dreams of their own before they decided to watch a cabal of rich, soulless fuckers take it all for themselves, and burn the rest. One day you wake up realizing that you're plugged into this industry of distractions and bullshit, and it's more difficult to unplug than you might have supposed.

The only thing left to do about it is to walk away, at least for a while. So we'll see how that goes. It's almost like weaning yourself from a drug, I would imagine, making an effort not to refresh the news aggregators and the Twitter feeds, to not check the basic cable yak-fests and the blogs and the rest of it all. They say a habit takes about twenty-eight days to take hold; how long does it take to break one so firmly rooted? We'll see, or not. There are many dragons, and they all want to be chased.

So here are a few parting (for now) observations and semi-educated guesses:

• Things will not get better until these people are gone, not just the Clownstick gang, but the whole lot of them. The political class really is corrupt to the core, owned by the hundredth-percenters who, true to the shade of Jay Gould, are engaged in the ongoing project of paying half the proles to kill the other half.
• They are enabled by the media, not just the blatant propaganda of Fixed Noise, but also the lazy, feckless "analysis" churn peddled by CNN and MSNBC. Gutless meta-commentary is reactive, and what more of the media need to be is proactive. Instead of showing up every day to the Baghdad Barb festival of lies and sneers, why not rundown Paul Campos' extremely plausible theory about yet another scandal. I mean, you constantly hear -- especially in a defensive capacity from journos themselves -- about how it's always the "juicy" stories that frequently overwhelm "better" stories. What could possibly be juicier than one of the RNC campaign finance chairs -- a man who has already served prison time for bribery and influence peddling, mind you -- being the bagman for a $1.6 million bribe to yet another Playmate, this time one who that fat, doddering fuck actually knocked up and pushed her to get an abortion? This is the supposedly librul media's big chance not only to stick it to the emperor and his dipshit fans, but the hypocritical, sanctimonious evangelicals who have publicly sacrificed their fake principles on the altar of convenience. Maybe pushing it like the stupid Roseanne thing, people will pick up on it with that kind of saturation. Again, what's the fucking hold-up here, what are they waiting for? Why do bloggerses and niche mags have to do all the heavy lifting?
  
  Not to mention all the self-dealing baked into the "trade wars" he's initiating. Did Oleg Deripaska give him a piece of Rusal in exchange for the unnecessary and damaging aluminum tariff? Does he have financial interests in the coal companies he is proposing to set up under a command-economy (that is, communist) system? It might be useful if a few of those headline-chasing morons got out of the press room and did something useful for a change.
  
  Never forget that this is ultimately their fault, every last bit of it. They failed to do their jobs, and continue to do so, and their mewling plaints about their being "too much to follow" ring hollow. Of course there's too much to follow. But you decide what to cover, and what gets saturated. So follow the important stuff. Just try it for once. We might all be pleasantly surprised by the results.
• Russia is steadily positioning itself to become the hegemon in the Middle East, distracting Clownstick and his grifting crew with the usual variety of bromides and blandishments. It's a perfect time to recall that the Great War -- which has never completely abated, merely ebbed and flowed with a generational rhythm -- was more the result of a power vacuum than the particular actions of a Serbian nationalist on a June morning.
  
  Israel, Turkey, Saudi Arabia, and Iran are all jockeying for position in the region, with Russia strategically enabling Iran and Syria. Meanwhile, the US has mostly pulled out, other than semi-covert conflicts in Syria and Yemen, and an overblown provocation in needlessly moving the Israeli Embassy to Jerusalem. Not that we should renew our involvement in the region overtly, and there is always a balance between financial self-interest and geopolitical strategy. But the current grifters are only interested in the former, and not at all in the latter. This will cost us greatly in the years to come, one way or another. So will having a government whose only two questions are What's in it for me? and How can we piss off libtards today?
• The cliché of "not my president" is a hoary one, to be sure. But in the current context, it is an extremely valuable one. He is definitely not your president; he isn't even the president of the people who voted for him and continue to suck his cheeto, who show up at the hate rallies and go on auto-chant, like the puling, worthless cult members they are. But also in the sense that he doesn't even pretend to do anything except shit on anyone who disagrees with him.
  
  Ideally (I know, I know) the office at least engages in the empty bromides of "bringing the country together" or what-have-you. There is at least the performance art of trying to discuss and establish some sort of unifying consensus, a sense of common purpose. There is not even the pretense of that anymore. That may be the root cause of the poisonous malaise we are all experiencing. There is no clear defining sense of what it means to be an American right now. You're either in this tribe or that tribe; you're either in the fan club or you're a hater and a loser. When we don't stand for anything anymore, merely against things, bad things are inevitable.
• Justine Bateman is absolutely right. Of course, I've been saying that for years, but I'm sure she has as well. Regardless, it can't repeated often enough: reality teevee has fucked this nation up, good and hard. And it's only getting worse.
• It will be interesting to see how long it takes for our closest allies to come back around to us. They don't know what to think of us anymore, and it's hard to blame them. I don't know what it will take to bring at least some of the cult around to how badly they've betrayed the ideals of their country, but I do know that it will take the media doing their jobs more effectively.
  
  This can't be over-emphasized enough -- the root of the entire problem, not just the symptom of Clownstick, but the disease he's a symptom of, is a direct result of their collective failure to do the right thing, to do the job as it was meant to be done. Politicians are not their friends, not their colleagues, they are merely sources to cultivate in order to collect the facts and present them as completely and accurately as possible. (Again, I know.) If you can't keep a source without compromising your ability to do your job, then you need to find a different career, one that doesn't involve selling cheeseburgers and tampons to senior citizens in exchange for cushy interviews and seven-figure salaries. Put down the appletinis and do your fucking jobs.

That's all I got for now. Good luck. Have fun. See you in a while.