American Carnage

And crows will eat your eyes. -- Motörhead, Traitor

I promise that I don't intend to make a habit of breaking radio silence, especially just a couple weeks after making a show of pulling the plug, but the events at the Capitol building on January 6th bear some consideration and discussion that I am missing in most of the mediocracy pow-wows so far. Watching the events unfold live, I realized I hadn't had such visceral feelings of genuine revulsion and anger since watching the second plane hit the World Trade Center.

Others have already brought up the 9/11 comparisons. But the thing is, if we are careless in pursuing true accountability and making it sting, the event may actually turn out to be closer to Fort Sumter. I know I've scoffed at the possibility of a true "civil war" dynamic in the past, and I still strongly believe that the lack of foresight, coordination, strategy, or even any aligned goal prevents these people from doing much in the way of setting up an actual competing governmental system.

But that doesn't mean they can't do a lot of damage and kill a lot of people giving it a try.

There appears to be genuine anger on the Democratic side, and a desire for real accountability and even retribution, and that's a great start. This is not something that can just be "let go" for the sake of comity. Many media observers were quick to frame the rioters as "domestic terrorists," and that too is good and necessary. Anyone shying away from those terms and that framing is in on the con, period.

There is nothing to be discussed or broached or reconciled with these rioters. At all. They are traitors and insurrectionists. Fuck them and their "Camp Auschwitz" and "6MWE (6 Million [Jews slaughtered in the Holocaust] Wasn't Enough)" tee-shirts. Fuck their treasonous flags, devoted to one individual rather than a show of loyalty to their country.

I am not joking in the slightest, nor trying to be polemic, when I say that as many of them as possible should be summarily tried in open hearings, and immediately after sentencing, lined up against a wall and shot. In an earlier time, they would have been gibbeted and immured, as a warning to others. Some of them are military. They should be court-martialed and sentenced to death. The death sentence can be commuted to life without parole at the Florence Supermax, or it can be carried out. I really don't give a shit which. They can dump these assholes into a filled swimming pool and toss a fucking toaster in for all I care.

At least some of those poor bastards back in the day, the folks who ended up in the gibbet, had legitimate grievances. These dopes have nothing but the nonsense they've been spoonfed by the lifelong liar Trump and his booze-soaked sidekick Ghouliani, who is probably lining up yet another thirsty pig to receive his slobbering, grotesque sexual overtures.

It has already been noted by multiple observers that it was just a damned lucky break that of the hundreds of legislators and staffers that were forced to quickly evacuate and hide and barricade themselves for hours, none of them were found and dragged and beaten or executed by the braying mob of traitorous slapdicks. Again, it wasn't for lack of trying.

There was a forty-foot gallows erected outside the building. How do you like them apples? Amazing what you can get away with when you're the right shade.

Another thing we need to understand fully is that all of this is exactly what he promised before the election -- and before the 2016 election. If I lose, it's because the election is rigged. Remember that, both times? Heads I win, tails you lose. There are always suckers -- people still purchase music and clothing from Kanye West. There will always be enough impressionable morons to make something happen, through deception and repetition. It's even easier when you have an entire teevee network at your disposal.

As the usual weasels start retconning excuses and strategems for "unity" (with what, precisely? Be specific, show your work, and your plan to get there from here.) and the like, we all need to consider the sort of craven individuals who make such proposals.

Imagine the sort of person who was in very real danger, whose colleagues and employees were in very real physical danger as well, and yet a couple days later, are bleating mealy noises about how we mustn't do anything at all to enrage these terrorists any further.

They were openly shouting for Mike Pence to be hung at their makeshift gallows. They were looking for Pelosi, for Schumer, for whoever they could tase and zip-tie into submission, for their fantasy show-trials. Oh no, we better not do anything to enrage them! Jesus H. Christ.

If you do not know your enemy by now, and truly understand them as such, you never will. I don't know what to tell such people, since they are clearly unyoked from any sort of moral compass, but are welded to a compelling motive of personal profit and ambition. Anyone insisting on a mitigation of accountability is a clear enemy of this country and all of its citizens, and needs to be treated accordingly. Let's not overthink this. They told us who they are, over and over again. At some point, it might be time to take them at their word.

The most important thing to consider about their weird collective psychosis is how they see themselves -- and each other, for that matter. Now, there is some money peppered through these crowds at certain nodes. All that faggy cult swag costs money, as does the tacticool gear, the trips all over the country to the rallies and the be-ins, like deadheads that took the brown acid and chased it with a bucket of Wild Turkey that had been left in the sun for a month.

But you can tell that the median morlock in these crowds is a goddamned loser -- not because their education abruptly halted somewhere around their seventeenth birthday, but because they felt at that point that they had learned and known enough, enough for the rest of their lives. And everything they've done in their lives since those critical decision points, every job and every relationship they've stumbled into and shouted themselves out of, reflects that outlook on life.

The word "loser" should be taken literally here, but like all such folks, they need to envision themselves as victims of circumstance, of the machinations of some malevolent force or baroque conspiracy. It can't just be that you're a willfully ignorant bum with anger management issues. It's always someone else's fault.

And now they're in their forties or fifties, these median dopes, their best years long behind them, and there warn't too many of those in the first place. They don't know much, but they know that much. The only thing they have to look forward to, the thing that informs what passes for their political sentiments, is the hope of pulling as many of their fella 'murkins down to the same level.

Remember the ancient joke about the campers awakened by the approaching bear, how you don't have to be faster than the bear, just faster than the other campers? Well, imagine the sort of person that just wants to be the bear.

But because these people still see themselves as good people, as decent people, they did what all delusional people do and crafted a story that casts themselves as heroes rather than villains. The crucible of social media, and the common bond of the Q mythos, enabled them to quickly forge a more solid and sweeping narrative for themselves, noble hobbitses headed for Mount Doom to thwart the satanic pedophile cabal headed by Hitlery Clinton.

Did I get all that right? Does it matter? The main thing is that it gives them the excuses and the rhetorical cover they need in order to strive for something they know is monstrous. It doesn't matter that the strike dates of the Q mythos keep shifting, like doomsday predictions from crackpot preachers. It doesn't matter that Trump can't show a single tangible accomplishment that would benefit any of them. It doesn't even matter that Trump turned on Pence -- and even on them -- by essentially conceding the day after the riot, by acknowledging that there would indeed be a transfer of power on January 20th.

Some of them will squawk about betrayal and such, but their hearts aren't in it. After all, they have nowhere else to go. I don't mean the garden-variety asshole coworker or uncle we all have in our lives; I mean specifically the individuals at the rallies, at the Capitol riot. I mean the sort of person who seriously thought that if they bum-rushed the Capitol cops, smeared shit on the walls and vandalized the place good and proper, maybe dragged a couple of heretics out to the makeshift gallows and strung 'em up, that the other 330 million of us would just roll over and go, Oh, okay guys, we see your point now. I guess we can go ahead and flip the script for Fat Orange Elvis' second term. No fucking problem.

No, the people who invaded the halls of American governance last Wednesday afternoon have nowhere else to go, politically, morally, spiritually. These are people who have alienated every sensible person who was in their lives, who have moved on without them. These are people who have been rolling around in an impermeable hamster ball of epistemic closure.

Ted Kaczynski holed himself up in a hundred-square-foot cabin in the remote wilderness, with nothing but his jotted musings and his increasingly fevered aspirations. Imagine if the Unabomber had been able to stew and commiserate for years with like-minded souls in members-only Fakebook groups, steadily bringing each others' sentiments and outlook to a rolling boil.

Cold, alone, and alive
You're afraid but that's not what I asked. Wanna go for a ride?
Sharpen your teeth, my darlings, sharpen your minds
Take a finger -- if the hand feeds you shit, take one scalp at a time. -- Them Crooked Vultures, Spinning In Daffodils

We have a crisis in our angry-yokel population, to be sure (best one I've seen so far is Coup Klux Klan), but it seems to me that the real -- and sorely under-reported -- crisis is in law enforcement, a term becoming an oxymoron on the level of jumbo shrimp or Holy Roman Empire.

We saw it all last summer, the beatdowns of unarmed college kids and elderly trespassers, in city after city after city. Violence occurred, and buildings were set ablaze, but in countless videos, it was rarely the Molotov cocktail chuckers who were getting the batons, but mostly the passive, unarmed resistors.

 

We've all just come to accept it, since the only people who can do anything about it refuse to. But the actions and behavior of the Capitol Police on January 6th indicate a non-zero percentage of officers and leadership who are coup sympathizers at best, and sabotaging moles at worst. They let these hooting yokels right in to do as they pleased, and escorted them out and down the steps when they were done. They risked the lives of their own fellow officers, and got one of their own killed.  Arrests were comically few and mostly late in the day, after media figures had already been openly questioning their, ah, dedication to their job.

One thing for sure is that they were fucking terrible at their job that day, the Capitol Police. How the hell is it that the terrorists plan openly online for weeks in advance, with the date, time, and location, and there's no preparation whatsoever, no barricades, no reinforcements, no orders to use force early and often? They had bike racks that the terrorists swiped and used as ladders to climb the walls.

Not to mention the fact that this entire time -- during the Capitol invasion and even last weekend in Frankfort, Kentucky -- there have been cells of armed white supremacists menacing state capitals across the country. Kansas, Oregon, Washington, Michigan. They're planning more leading up to the 20th. No one is doing a goddamned thing about any of it. Wonder why that is.

This is not just a constitutional crisis. This is a very real crisis in "law enforcement" and what that entails, quite literally. You have an entire class of people who are held completely unaccountable, who are legally immunized from everything they do, no matter how awful. In the cities, they are militarized, and far more powerful than the legally elected city councils and mayors and such. They decide which laws to enforce, and how rigorously, and upon whom.

 

Their choices in those regards should be clear to all right now. It's certainly clear to the terrorists. They knew they wouldn't be touched, and they were right. Hell, they were given directions to Schumer's office. They put their feet up on Pelosi's desk. They took selfies with these paragons of law and order.

There is no justice if laws are not enforced equally. This is so obvious that it shouldn't need to be said. Yet here we are. It's good that people are finally saying it out loud. But as much effort as it's going to take to send the treasonous cockroaches scuttling back to their swamp caves, it's going to take ten times that effort -- a hundred times -- to weed out all the sympathizers and the thugs and the fascists that infest every level of this nation's law enforcement services.

 

I honestly don't think it's doable, and it's a real problem. We'll see on January 20th, for starters; now that one of their own came up as a casualty of their malicious incompetence, the CP have to at least make a half-hearted show of force for whatever inaugural recognition is taking place that day. Maybe we should all send them reminders to put on their fucking calendars.

 

Some of the assholes are coming back for seconds, and some new assholes are planning on showing up as well. They've printed up tee-shirts and everything, with the date and location. Maybe you should prepare, you know, just in case. Like a security type of thing.

And then people will go back to what they were doing, assuming that the foot-dragging agencies and entities entrusted with making these fuckers pay dearly will actually do their jobs. I have a feeling we'll be disappointed in that regard, which will only embolden them for the next round, for the eventual Tim McVeigh type who isn't a booger-eating cartoon character, but a trained, focused, committed killer.

 

There's been a lot of close calls with this sort of thing lately. Think about how close the governor of Michigan came to being kidnapped, tortured, and murdered by a cell of these "militia" dinks a few months back. You only get so many rolls of the dice before they come up snake eyes.

 

I hope I'm wrong. As of now, it looks like impeachment will happen, as will an effort to expel the treasonous congress-critters who fomented and supported this bullshit. Let them all swing for it.

Now, the right of revolution is an inherent one. When people are oppressed by their government, it is a natural right they enjoy to relieve themselves of the oppression, if they are strong enough, either by withdrawal from it, or by overthrowing it and substituting a government more acceptable. But any people or part of a people who resort to this remedy, stake their lives, their property, and every claim for protection given by citizenship--on the issue. Victory, or the conditions imposed by the conqueror--must be the result. 

-- President Ulysses S. Grant

Let's be clear -- the people who showed up to storm the seat of American governance (such as it is) are not good people, nor are they patriots. They don't give a fuck about this country, only their nihilistic death cult. They must be prosecuted to the fullest extent of the law, or they're just going to do it again and again until they succeed. The people defending them and attempting to find points of "reconciliation" are even worse -- they know better and actually have power to do the right thing, but choose not to.

 

They don't want unity or justice, they want appeasement. They want reassurances that once again, for the umpteenth time, angry crackers have the "right" to expect leniency and complaisance. I don't know who they think they're fooling with this bullshit, but it ain't happening anymore. They bought the ticket, they can take the ride.

It's not all grim -- for starters, Sheldon Adelson is dead, as are Josh Hawley's presidential ambitions. Ted Cruz is finding himself more and more on an island. The Powers That Really Be have at long last decided that Fuckface Von Clownstick's antics really are bad for business, and so they are pulling the plug on the whole black op. Assholes are getting deplatformed, and it is glorious to watch them vent and preen in futility.

(Anyone starting in with that "freeze peach" bullshit can go right on ahead and fuck themselves with a pineapple. Not only are you not "free" to organize terrorist attacks and incite violence, you're definitely not free to use someone else's private business to do that shit. I mean seriously, have any of these morons ever even skimmed a EULA? The same question keeps coming up with Trump and all of his dupes -- are these people really that fucking stupid, or is it that they think everyone else is dumb enough to believe their bullshit?)

 

And in fact, so many of these dopes seem determined to prove that they're even stupider than they seem, which is always entertaining. The best part was when some of them -- led, to be fair, by their elite mouthpieces in the media and rump House insurgency caucus -- tried to blame the dreaded antifa. This would be the part in every cult where the cultists prove their loyalty by faithfully regurgitating something that they know not to be true, while insisting that it must be true because the leader said so.

 

Both the cultists and the leader understand this dynamic between them -- the leader knows that the flock know this thing to be false, yet prove themselves to him with this test. If he wanted a night with each of their wives and daughters instead, they'd gladly grant him that. That's not an exaggeration -- it's a death cult. They have shown over and over again that they are willing to die for him, willing to commit acts of violence and kill for him. It's not hyperbole. As dumb as they are, they are dangerous people and need to be treated as such. This goes for the petit bourgeoisie assholes who showed up, every bit as much as for the cartoon characters we mostly saw.

But the idea that any antifa-BLM type of counter-protester was anywhere near there, much less staging a false-flag incident in the midst of the real mob, is of course ludicrous. Here's a few things that should be said in response every time someone tries to pull that line:

• Gee, it's too bad none of the Real 'murkin Patriots there was able to stop them.
• If they were antifa, the cops would have actually beaten and arrested them.
• Even if they were antifa, prosecute and imprison them just the same.
• I don't believe that you really believe that. We know you know better.
  

That settles that. The other darkly humorous aspect was in a couple of the terrorist deaths. One asshole tased himself in the balls and had a heart attack, while trying to steal a portrait of Tip O'Neill. One gal got trampled while carrying her "Don't Tread On Me" flag.

You can't say the writers aren't pulling out all the stops this season.

I also enjoy reading the perfunctory, anonymized accounts of how dismayed and disheartened the various minions and dogsbodies have become. Their professional and personal ambitions thwarted, because it turns out that white-shoe law firms not only are notoriously gun-shy about hiring nazis, they also aren't terribly interested in hiring the assistant to the regional nazi. Who would have thought?

I'd say their choices are clear:  they can assess their role in this ongoing catastrophe, and how much time and effort they put into it, and come up with an honest multiplier, and put that amount of time and effort into some charitable pursuit -- helping the unhoused; rescuing animals; distributing vaccines; penning public apologia for being fucking scumbags and promising to do better with their given time in this mortal plane.

 

So, for example, the kid who brings Dear Leader his Diet Coke every hour can just do a 1:1 or 1.5:1 amount of time in such a pursuit. Kayleigh MagaNinny, on the other hand, needs at least a decade or so at a truly charitable pursuit that doesn't line her pockets, a place where she can truly contemplate what an awful facsimile of a human she let herself become. (Recalling, of course, that like so many of these interchangeable minions, she was vocally anti-Clownstick before she started cashing his checks.)

 

Or they can all go back to their respective homes, eat one final cheeseburger and jerk off one last time, and blow their fucking brains out. I really don't care which they choose, so long as we are spared any additional public navel-gazing from these dismal parasites, who take and destroy and lie and perpetuate their seedy little hustles, and then expect us to feel sorry for them when it predictably blows up in their faces.

 

Even allowing for the incredibly unlikely conditions I propose above, even where there might happen to be some form of genuine contrition and regret, none of them should be allowed anywhere near the levers of real governmental power again. They've already shown what they're capable of. There are plenty of people who can do government service right. There's no reason to try to rehabilitate traitors and failsons and shitheads. Again, if any of them had any real sense of shame, they'd have already done the right thing. Their problem is that they've been seen for what they are. Head on back home to Goatfuck, Missourah, and prepare to spend the rest of your sad life running dad's Kia dealership.

To listen to the plaints of these turds is to listen to their boss, the impotent threats implied in a cascade of wheedling and cajoling. It's like it never occurred to any of these assholes that it's possible to make money and be happy without being a complete piece of shit, without surrendering your soul.

I try to conjure an image of the sort of person whose biggest ambition is to push ass for Rupert Murdoch's red-baiting agitprop network, or to defend resource extractors and poisoners, to cash those fat checks and spend it on slightly better bottles of single-malt, a slightly bigger McMansion in a slightly better neighborhood, a slightly newer XUV to drive to the Whole Foods. People who think that that's all there is to life, all that's worth having and doing. People who will align and attach themselves to the lowest types in order to fulfill those empty dreams.

They're as bad as the rest of them, really. They hide behind their uptown degrees and their family connections, but they're willing to con violent rubes into doing the wetwork, they're willing to affix their lips to the rump of the despot, regardless of the souls he chooses to squish in his ascent to fleeting greatness and vainglorious conquest. The people who do evil, who commit the acts to further the agenda, cannot do what they do without the ceaseless behind-the-scenes toiling of these little Eichmanns.

They'll never do the right thing on their own, and you hate to use the word "purge," but the house is in dire need of a cleaning, to say the least. And make no mistake, had a few states turned the other way, or just made it close enough to steal, they would have completed the purge they've been doing in plain sight the whole time. The Foreign Service is gutted. There has been zero transition planning or coordination since the election. Even without a coup, the Biden Administration starts off in a deep hole, and that is by design and intent. Everything you see going on right now is because someone wants it that way.

And that's not just Trump, that's the little worker ants who were all too willing and happy to do his bidding. And now they're caught and identified and blackballed. They're worried about their future job prospects Well, fuck them. They deserve to never hold decent employment again. Let them toil away in Jeff Bezos' warehouses for nickels on the dollar. Make sure to send all the corporations who bankrolled the putsch a nice "fuck you" card while you're at it.

This is about retribution, but more than that, it's a deeply practical matter. Everyone involved in this beer-belly putsch -- and it ain't over yet, you just watch -- needs to be made to pay dearly, or it'll just keep happening until they get it right.

The bullshit stops with just two words -- enforce laws. Enforce them equally -- rich, poor, black, white, cops, civilians, famous, anonymous, the powerful and the powerless, from hedge-funders to hedge-trimmers. Maybe the question everyone should be asking is why it seems to be so damned difficult to live up to those two simple words.

Let's end with a poem of sorts, shall we?

The Art of the Fall of Rome, by D.J. Trump (with profound apologies to W.H. Auden):

Knuckleheads ascend the stairs

Approach en masse the blessed doors;

With incoherent yowls and roars

Affix the mall cops with mighty glares.

Messaging in fecal scrawls

The atmosphere grows ever tense,

As chants of "Hang that fucker Pence"

Echo through historic halls.

Cerebrotonic Q-balls may

Wrack their wretched lizard brains,

To seek the secret money trains

Where jooz transport their pilfered pay.

Homoerotic banners billow

As they catch the wafting breeze.

The bozos hear the lilting wheeze

Of the asshole from My Pillow.

Debt-collectors begin to swarm

Around the supercilious jerks

Writing I DO NOT LIKE MY WORK

On their non-disclosure forms.

Unsurprised it turned out shitty,

Tremendous birds with the best legs --

Seriously, people, you've never seen such legs --

Flee from plague-ravaged cities.

Altogether elsewhere, vast

Herds of morons move around;

Can't get back up, so they can't sit down

Awaiting their quadruple bypass.

And in the end, the bitter cry

Because they never found the nerve

To tell the chumps what they deserve

To please, at last, fuck off and die.

Turd Mentality

Come 2030, only the rats will be happy. -- Stephen King, 1922

The Holocaust is not only history, but warning. -- Timothy Snyder, Black Earth

One hears the clatter, as the corporate media valiantly attempt to revert to their natural horse-race stasis, about the elusive "shy" Trump voter, that numinous unicorn of frustrated pollsters and halfwit pen-jockeys. This is the person who, when contacted by pollsters, supposedly claims as independent -- or even, amazingly, undecided.

I just can't decide between the kindly, ancient lifelong corporatist, or the burbling lunatic avatar of full-throated white supremacy. Neither campaign has sufficiently marketed itself to my delicate sensibilities.

Considering that the median Trump voter has, in its practically infinite guises -- construction worker, harried soccer mom, fist-shaking codger at Wichita Stuckey's -- embodied one common trait, that of incoherent yet sanctimonious fury, it beggars belief that there is an abundant cohort of like-minded individuals who just don't want to confess their devotion anonymously over the phone for fifteen seconds.

Perhaps the "shy" one, like the elusive sasquatch, exists but quietly, secretly, perpetually crouched in a furtive state, appearing only rarely and at random to adorn the fuzzy freeze-frames of hooch-addled mountaineers -- not to mention the credulous rubes of the aforementioned corporate media, very nearly as duped as the noise-addled rage-monkeys they so dutifully chronicle.

Never mind; the ultimate point of such leprechaun-hunting is really to keep it close, keep those ad buy rates as high as possible. Money is the blood of such things, and every campaign season is a newer iteration of The Texas Chainsaw Massacre.

Between greed, laziness, and an unshakable institutional impulse to keep Democrats on a hook while letting their opponents' worst excesses go lightly covered, the practical outcome is to keep liberals and Democrats (to the extent that those actually overlap) always on their heels, always unable to push forward with any real force and/or clarity that might undermine the ongoing plutocratic insurgency -- which, after all, underwrites the entire tedious theatrical exercise.

If there is such a thing as a "shy" Trumpkin, maybe the reason they're keeping it quiet is because they know what they are and what they support, and the secret they're really hiding is that they're embarrassed of it. Which they should have been a couple years ago at most. Maybe they just don't want their friends to know what they are.

I doubt it. I know which of my friends and relatives still support him, we just don't talk about that anymore. It's actually pretty easy to shut down -- once they start bringing up the perfidy of the libturd media argle-bargle, all you have to do is respond, "You don't need to watch the media. All you need to do is watch him unedited, unabridged, unexpurgated on YouTube. There are hundreds of videos to choose from. Pick one at random. Make it interesting with a bottle of liquor. Drink every time he says something stupid and/or untrue. You'll be dead of alcohol poisoning by the twenty-minute mark."

You'd be surprised -- or perhaps you wouldn't -- at how quickly they change the subject, or at least the idiotic "fake news" tack of their dead-horse excuse for an argument.

A functional "opposition" media would be ringing Noel Casler's phone off the fucking hook. Aside from a People (of all things) article a couple years ago, I'm unaware of any major media entity that has talked to him. Certainly not CNN or MSNBC or the networks, these supposedly nefarious, scurrilous bastards who take any and every opportunity to crucify Orange Jebus every chance they get with their entirely made-up attacks.

You can't even chalk that version of institutional cowardice up to the marketplace. Are you fucking kidding? Casler @'s every single one of his targets, every time. Any responsible journamalist would at least run down the allegations, which are numerous and colorful -- and true.

The people that we're friends with or related to are generally not a uniform bunch, unless you grew up in a highly insular, conformist community. But most of us have some sort of balance of these various people in our lives. And we bond with them over different things -- music, cars, food, and occasionally politics is a conversational spice in all that, but generally not a qualifying factor or a disqualifying one.

A reasonable rule of thumb might be that the degree to which someone is eager to befriend or defriend someone for purely political reasons is likely to be directly proportional to your own depth of political fervor. Either that or the other person has become such an insufferable pain in the ass, they don't talk about anything else anymore, which is just exhausting these days. Looks like the ol' #TrumpPlague showed up just in time, eh?

I think what we're finding is that we've always been able to "agree to disagree" over usual, normal differences of policy preferences:  taxes, guns, education, blondes vs. brunettes, etc. And now those days are gone and we're not quite sure how to handle an increasingly volatile impasse.

But what you find when you read these countless anecdotes about people who "just can't even" anymore with their elderly parents, their co-workers, their Fakebook friends, whatever -- it's not really the political specifics that drives the problem. It's that people who live in different realities don't really have all that much to talk about anymore.

I mean, there are some basic principles in the mix as well -- for example, I happen to think rather strongly that the chief executive of this country ought not to be a rapist, an boastful pervert, a shameless asshole, a pathological liar, and/or a clownish moron. These would be foundational for me even if things were going well, though I could certainly be flexible on those ideals if, for example, such a person also managed to resolve some or all of the many dire crises facing this hollowed-out husk of a nation.

But they're not going well, and a big part of that is because of all those vile traits. By way of contrast, one could also be at least somewhat forgiving of current circumstances if said chief executive were kind, honest, intelligent, empathetic, strategic, and made even a modest good-faith effort at resolving some of these crises. But as we're seeing, character really is destiny. It does matter.

And we can tell ourselves it's just because we're all too polarized or propagandized or whatever, but the daily ingestion of this garbage political culture we're all immersed in has this as yet another in a long list of consequences. The contradictions have heightened, and it turns out that how you view all these polarizing events that tumble through our collective view every day or so clarify how you view the world in general, what's "real" and what isn't.

I don't know what to make of someone who sees Trump as competent or qualified for any job. His behavior would have gotten him fired from mop-up duty at a porn theater by now. More seriously, try to imagine a single company anywhere -- even a company that publicly slobbers over him -- giving him any sort of real job.

I'm not bullshitting here. Here's a challenge to consider:  that My Pillow asshole, Lindell? If Trump loses the election, I fuckin' dare that chump to give Trump any sort of actual job duty, anywhere in his company -- production, shipping, sales, accounting, finance. Anything. I defy the most Trump-eyed pelf-grubber out there to put their filthy money where their mouths are, and offer him an actual job that creates measurable value for that company.

It won't happen because Trump is a doddering, worthless piece of shit who's never been good at anything except stealing and lying, and his billionaire butt-buddies are slightly more adept turds of a feather. Lying and hypocrisy are their real currencies. The only thing Mike Lindell or Stan Kroenke or Charles Koch or any of these greedy bastards care about is having more, and you having less.

So of course they love Fat Donnie. But even if he were twenty or forty years younger, they'd never give him any sort of real job, one that involved work. At most they'd cut him a check to do a promo commercial for them. But again, I mean actual fucking work, something that takes skill, focus, ability. Something more than just delegating to minions.

And that reflects a certain way I view the world, and my expectations of the other people who share it. I don't know what to make of someone who saw any of Tuesday's clown hall event with George Snuffleupagus, and came away thinking we're in good hands. I don't know what to make of someone who is so brain-damaged that after five years of watching Trump's incessant prattling bullshit, they still think he's qualified to pick his own drug-decayed nose.

I do know that there aren't any more arguments or debates to be had.

Twenty Points Down

The popular phrase in preventing the smug assumption that Biden will beat the evil clown in a landslide, even though he clearly should beat that failed attempt at a functioning human being by seventy points and five hundred electoral votes, is to act like you're way behind in the polls. Ignore the polls. Don't get lulled into complacency by months of leading in the polls. And so forth.

This is fine as far as it goes, but it's easy to forget that people have been repeating that mantra for months with regard to a Biden-Trump matchup specifically, and they've been beating themselves with it for several years in general.

And it's a great idea in general. Show up. Make sure you can show up. Don't ever get complacent again, at any level.

With that mantra in mind, combined with current circumstances and rhetoric, it is not unreasonable or unforeseeable that many people are getting concerned about the practicalities of the election itself -- counting the votes properly, abiding by the results, transferring power properly. When you've been dulling your senses for the past four years that at least a third of your fellow citizens are perfectly okay with an open slide into outright fascism, it makes sense that you might start expecting the worst.

So I get where this guy is coming from, as far as the political probabilities go, and I think we can probably be cautiously optimistic about the ultimate outcome here.

But you know, I'd drop the whole quit being so paranoid, you fucking ninnies tone there. This has been a consistent pattern throughout Trump's reign of error -- the insistence that norms and rules and process will ensure correct outcomes. And in each instance, he has proven that none of that shit matters if there's no one to enforce it, if the only side that even respects those things anymore is also the side that refuses to use every tool at their disposal to exert what little power they actually have.

It's not a paranoid pipe dream at all:  Trump has repeatedly said that any election outcome where he doesn't win is by definition illegitimate. He continues to maintain this stance. No one is challenging him on it in any meaningful way -- not his own party, not the corporate media, not the courts, nobody.

It doesn't require any sort of violent overthrow, or even a stubborn "refusal" to vacate the White House. All he has to do is what he's openly threatened to do, and what political observers across the spectrum have speculated -- declare victory early, before mail-in ballots are counted; if Biden is the winner after the mail-in count, declare those votes invalid (as he has been doing for months already); muddy the waters just enough to throw it to the courts and the individual states.

He has all those tools at his disposal. His own party has long given up challenging him on anything; he could nuke Omaha tomorrow and Ben Sasse would say, Thank you sir, may I have another?. The Democrats have made it clear that they are either completely unable or unwilling to undertake any meaningful action. They will wait and dither and agonize until it's too late.

Now, do I think all of these things will happen? Probably not, but there is definitely a non-zero chance of it. It's definitely possible.

And that's the real trick right there, the root explanation for why so many people right now have this desperate, anxious undercurrent. It's not just that Trump is a piece of shit, or that the people who work for him are scumbags, or that the corporate media are cowed by the whole circus and just want clicks. It's the realization that there are more angry idiots and toxic weirdos out there than they thought there were, and that they have real leverage now.

The rise of the QAnon cult -- an utterly ludicrous, incoherent smattering of conspiracy jabber -- is a perfect example. Imagine a group of people that spin these credulous yarns about cannibal pedo cults and sex trafficking, while they emphatically support a party featuring such well known pedophiles and enablers such as Jim Jordan, Dennis Hastert, and Roy Moore.

And Trump himself -- in countless videos hanging out partying with his good buddy (and one-time neighbor) Jeffrey Epstein, on audio and video describing how much fun he had peeping in on teenage pageant contestants getting dressed, on his own daughter being a hot piece of ass, on sexually assaulting women. Right now he's refusing to give DNA that would exonerate him on a rape charge.

And yet you have this seething, teeming, growing movement of cult loons -- maybe thousands, maybe more -- who would rather construct an insane, impossibly baroque conspiracy that has no basis in fact, than confront the very real network of people right in front of them who indulge in sexual perversion.

I know that as good libruls, we're not supposed to judge others on their sex kinks, and 99% of the time, that's a pretty good rule to follow. But in the context of their own words and beliefs, it's helpful to keep in mind:  Roger Stone is an orgiast who gets off on watching his wife get spit-roasted by strangers. Paul Manafort enjoyed setting up gangbangs for his own wife, who has some cognitive disabilities from a horse-riding accident years ago, and may not have been an entirely willing participant.

Again, we're not allowed to judge, but just consider for a moment the sort of sexual pathologies one must have for those activities. This kind of shit makes the Falwells look like rank amateurs. Now keep in mind that Stone and Manafort have been business partners for forty years. One of their earliest clients -- who they still work for to this very day -- was a young swashbuckling real-estate developer named Donald Trump.

Turds of a feather, you know? I wouldn't stay in the same room with people like Stone or Manafort for five minutes, and I led a pretty wild life for a long time. And I sure as fuck wouldn't turn to people like that for guidance or advice on running a country. These are people who have spent their adult lives weaponizing the worms in their brains in the devil's arena of political consultancy, where nothing is true and everything goes.

We have a good chance of muddling through all this ugliness, if enough people are willing to show up and stick with it. But let's not shit on the folks that are getting nervous about their prospects. They have no one they can trust anymore -- their fellow 'murkins have lost their fucking minds, the Democratic party is full of ineffectual blowhards, the Republicon party is full of flat-out traitors, the basic mechanisms of the country no longer function, and the figurehead tyrant has openly promised multiple times to fuck up the electoral process.

You don't have to be paranoid, but you might want to at least wonder what the contingency plan is for when shit starts coming down. Hoping that certain people will "do their job" when that has failed multiple times previously is barely more than nothing.

Unindicted Co-Conspirators

I get what Martin is saying here, and agree with it as far as it goes. But this election is no longer a referendum on Trump and his motley band of dumbfellas. It's a referendum on us, pure and simple. As exhausting as the toddler-in-chief's daily poop-throwing has been, at least there's a perverse core of sense in it. It's in his rational self-interest for him to do the things he does, so he can keep laundering bratva money, looting the treasury, keep his worthless ass out of prison, etc. It sucks, but at least you can draw a thread of rationality to why he does what he does.

It's the rest of the animals in the zoo -- not just the people who work for him, whether at the State Spartment or at Fox News; but the Republicon congress-weasels who worked their way into their offices back when Trump was a broke clown between trophy wives; the Democrat congress-weasels whose worst nightmare is saying anything that might be objectionable to some pearl-clutching idiot in the midwest; and most of all, the broke-ass redneck derelicts who have nothing to gain and everything to lose, and would rather cut their own throats so they can trade retarded Fakebook memes with the dopes they dropped out of high school with. That last group does it all for free.

So that's what this is really all about -- if there really are more of us than them, if we are actually gonna show up in sufficient numbers, if this country is going to be worth a plug nickel in the coming years. There is still hope for that, but not much confidence or trust. And a lot of that is because of that collective hypocrisy, stupidity, chimp-menace grin masking a pinched, ugly, brutal view of the world, people who happy to rent themselves out in order to make that view reality, people who do it just for the fun of it.

Whatever is in store, the election is the beginning of it, not the end or even a step. It's a new era, either a descent into full fascism or an attempt to repudiate it. In the latter case, it will take real work and commitment from the people we elect to office, not mealy-mouthed gestures and puling plaints.

Turns out some people really do just want to watch the world burn. Well, it's burning -- here in the State of Jefferson, I haven't seen the sky for the better part of six weeks or so. There are huge fires up and down the entire west coast, thanks to that tricksy hoax from the sneaky Chinee. And no one's doing a goddamned thing about it, so we're about to find out just how many of those "watch it all burn" folks there really are.

Suckers and Losers

Everybody has read the article by now, and absolutely nobody is surprised. Maybe it will move the needle a touch, but probably not, which is the real story.

Maybe he's right -- maybe people who are willing to serve and sacrifice for The State, a faceless leviathan that may or may not be there for them in their time of need, have been bamboozled. Maybe the people who continue to support this fucking monster, whose defining trait is open contempt of the very concepts of charity and grace, are also suckers and losers. Maybe the liberals and Democrats, waiting for their elected leaders to do something even performatively and making excuses for why they refuse to, are also suckers.

[Case in point:  Impeach Bill Barr now. He is openly discussing the ways in which he will sow distrust in the election results, and foment civil unrest. He has already lied to Congress multiple times, including at his job interview. It doesn't matter that the Republicon senators are traitors and will acquit him. The investigative process will generate enough evidence that can be use to prosecute Barr if Biden wins. And if Biden loses -- or "loses"? Hope your passport's in good shape.]

Maybe my dad, who fought the Nazis in the Atlantic and the Imperial Japanese in the Pacific, who was literally en route to Japan on a fucking minesweeper when we dropped the bombs on Hiroshima and Nagasaki, was a sucker for believing that his efforts then were necessary to keep the country he loved from turning into a mass of sweaty, ignorant slobs. Maybe my uncle, who served two tours in Vietnam as a Marine platoon leader and got soaked in Agent Orange, and died hard just a few weeks after his fifty-first birthday twenty years ago, was a sucker for jumping into a fight he was told was right and just. He got there and saw the truth and came back changed, and spent the rest of his life trying to get back what he'd lost. I have a younger cousin who joined the Marines earlier this year, for a CINC who's made it clear that he couldn't care less that the Russians are paying Islamic militants bounties on American military corpses. Sucker!

And on and on. It's a giant, all-encompassing scam, and we've all bought into some aspect or other of it. Remember when a couple of feckless billionaires inserted themselves into the Democratic primary, just long enough to knock Elizabeth Warren outta there? Where's OK Bloomer now that we could use his precious money, not just for Biden but for at least six or eight Senate seats? Where's Tom Steyer and all his bro-gressive happy talk? Yeah, they really care about "their country," but it's a different country than the rest of us live in.

Maybe the folks out in the streets protesting, as well-meaning as they are, might be suckers as well. They think something will "change" from their efforts. Well, you've been doing it all summer, and the only thing that's changed is that the police forces of Portland, Minneapolis, Kenosha, and NYC -- all cities run by liberal Democratic mayors in states run by liberal Democratic governors -- are much more comfortable openly displaying their true sympathies.

They stand aside while roving white supremacist gangs barrel through crowds in their $70k trucks and attack unarmed protesters. They let assault-rifle-toting kids who have just murdered people in the street with a weapon they were not legally allowed to possess just walk on by. They have not stopped killing, beating, kidnapping. They have made their position entirely clear, and no one is even pretending to try to stop them.

Black Lives Matter? Are you fucking kidding? Your life doesn't matter, liberal white protester. As far as the redneck death squads and their good buddies on the PD are concerned, you're not white. They probably won't shoot you seven times in the back, but you never know. They sure as hell won't stop the bearded goon with the riot helmet and the Kevlar Pepe the Frog vest from stomping the shit out of you.

Now that we're in the final sixty days of the electoral race, people are starting to look at the clock, because they're exhausted, demoralized, disheartened. They want it to "be over," but it will never be over. This is just beginning, sorry to say, but as we near the homestretch in this here blog, I am convinced that that will be the crushing minor chord I will end with in a few months.

Getting rid of Trump is -- and really, always was -- only the symbolic part of it. It's real, and it's vital to any semblance of continuity in what passes for elected representation in this flawed experiment. The real challenge, as the Atlantic article lays out so clearly, is in figuring out just how to deal with individuals who are fine with all of it. They have constructed an alternate reality for themselves, one that gives them permission -- hell, makes it their patriotic duty -- to support this thug who so openly disparages military service and sacrifice.

And putatively liberal media outlets make painstakingly multiple efforts over and over again to construct their own alternate reality, one where these people are Real 'murkins, who support monsters out of some well-meaning intent and love for their country. Such articles are not only worthy of every bit of scorn and derision we can muster, they also represent a profound dereliction of journalistic duty.

These people should be portrayed as they truly are -- as people who gladly support all of this, every bit of it. They are lying when they mutter something about "wish he would tweet less" or whatever. They love the tweets. After all, he's doing what they wish they had the platform to do -- tell all them fags and libruls and race-traitors to go fuck themselves. They wish he'd tweet more, that he'd crack down more on all the people they've been taught to hate, conditioned like hamsters in Fox News' Skinner box to pat the metal plate for the daily outrage pellet. I don't know if it's possible to deprogram most of them at this point. I do know that there is no point in trying to engage with them anymore.

It's easy for him, because he's never served anyone or sacrificed anything. He's never had to learn or understand or know anything, because he's rented minions to wipe his ass for him his entire miserable life. But the working-class schmuck that still rolls with all this? That's a harder nut to crack, and I don't know if you even want to waste your time on it. Remember that the largest number of voters is non-voters, and ask yourself why, and if there's a way to reach them.

Are they really lazy and stupid, or do they see the lack of leadership and conviction (to varying degrees, of course) on both sides, and simply say no? There's no excuse for doing that this time around, but again, if the opposition party started playing with a real sense of urgency, instead of always just playing not to lose, they might motivate some of those sideline spectators for once. What's the harm in trying?

The Next Kyle

There's at least one of these assholes in every town:

A Black girl was beaten and harassed by a boy in an apparently racially motivated attack in Kansas.

Brandi Stewart said her 11-year-old daughter, Nevaeh Thomas, was playing with friends outside an apartment complex Friday evening near her Shawnee school when an older boy began taunting her with racial slurs, reported WDAF-TV.

....

The girl responded by telling the 12-year-old boy that “my Black is beautiful” — and that’s when he allegedly knocked her unconscious with a pole.

His parents must be proud. The kid will get some slap on the wrist, just enough to piss him off more at the injustice of it all, and then....well, you just wait until he hits eighteen or twenty-one. The trajectory of losers like that is as predictable as a drop of rain. He'll last just long enough to inflict real damage to someone else someday. That's all people like that do, and these days, they are overtly encouraged to do so as they please.

This nation, like most, has deep, ugly pathologies that it has tried to alleviate and/or remove, with varying levels of effort and success. That kid was taught by someone to treat other people like that. It gets passed down from generation to generation like some evil family heirloom, sweating, pulsating, sentient.

I don't know what you do to end it. I used to think that simply leveling the playing field for these sorts would at least put their "economic anxieties" on the back burner, and I still think economic justice is a necessary precursor to real social justice. But it's also likely that many of them would still be hateful assholes, just with more money.

I do hope that this poor girl grows and gains the understanding that not everyone is like the thing that attacked her, that most people really are not like that (though a distressing number of them really are like that). It's just the vocal zombie contingent that gets the most attention, who distract us all from the basic fact that there's still a slight majority of us who just want to live a life unencumbered by doubt and debt and hate and fear.

That is not to say that "love conquers hate" or "non-violence overcomes violence" or any of that nonsense. History should clarify that for you with a quickness. It is to say that, whatever else, a life lived immersed in hate and lies tends to be nasty, short, and brutish. It cannot be pleasant or peaceful or contemplative, bereft of anything resembling an inner life or an appreciation for anything worth appreciating.

There is no joy in the life of a person who treats other people like garbage, only the temporary escape from an ugly existence. The lies of the ad hoc heroic myth fade away quickly, and the person quickly realizes that people who live in the real world -- employers, friends, even relatives -- want nothing to do with him, that the only people who will associate with him are all awful.

Imagine, for a second, being someone like Laura Ingraham or Tucker Carlson, being just smart enough to know that what you do is disgusting and scummy, but being just dumb enough to believe that there is some amount of money that will fill the hole where your soul once was.

This is the life Kyle Rittenhouse has ahead of him, whether or not he goes to prison [Narrator: He won't.]. There will only be thirsty opportunists and hangers-on, and generational racists who will want to further indoctrinate him. It's a vicious, self-reinforcing dynamic, and we've seen it all before.

(All that said, I am not convinced that Rittenhouse is a racist per se. He seems more like an impressionable, not-terribly-bright kid who went looking for trouble and found some. Whether the white-power-adjacent influences in his information system take a more influential role as his life progresses along its new path obviously remains to be seen. It seems likely, though.)

All you can really do is shun them, but completely. That goes even more so for the enablers and handlers and media shitheads who use their platforms to push this evil nonsense just to put a few more bucks in their pockets. Many of them appear to be in their mid-twenties or early thirties. These people should never be able to feel comfortable around decent people again.

Opportunity Costs

Throughout the summer, I've been thinking a great deal about the various opportunities we have managed to collectively squander -- chances to rethink fundamental assumptions about "how" "things" "work" in "society," what all those terms mean for various stakeholders, and how quality-of-life metrics could and should have been improved upon or at least touched in this crisis, but instead, of course, were ignored, scorned, repudiated.

This essay is a nice distillation of that grand -- yet very small, personal, intimate -- idea. What kind of life do we want for ourselves, and for the people we care about? What was our dream, and how has it changed?

Few things sum up the dynamic of brutal end-stage capitalism than a handful of millionaires, hustling away at the behest of billionaires, telling the working-class rubes to get their lazy asses back to work, that an extra $600/month for a few months will turn them irretrievably into lazy slackers. You know, like the Wal-Mart heirs and all their kids.

Wait, you say, Wal-Mart is a corporation. They provide goods and services the free market wants. They earned whatever money they have, and can bequeath it how they see fit.

Fair enough. But Wal-Mart also has always used taxpayer-funded gubmint largesse to fund its lucrative operations. From the long-term tax abatements and incentives to open up in economically depressed areas, to deliberately shorting employee hours so they have to get public assistance for food and health care, the Waltons have always suckled at the teat of Uncle Sucker.

You paid for that two-hundred-foot yacht where the family celebrates New Year's in Sydney Harbor. You paid for the useless grandkid who went to USC and paid a classmate to write all their papers and take their tests for them. You paid for the infrastructure improvements that were necessary just to get the stores built in all those little towns.

Public subsidy, private profit. It's a phrase that crops up a great deal, once you start doing a little digging on where the money comes from, and where it ends up.

There are countless opportunities for a better society that we have always passed on, obviously. But during the #TrumpPlague, three huge ones stand out:

• Education. In a world where information is at everyone's fingertips, we no longer need a century-old indoctrination system we borrowed from the Prussians. Education now is about three valuable things:  knowing what knowledge is useful; knowing where to find it; and hands-on experience. It's more involved than that, but those are the basics. Socialization is fine and valuable, but the toys have already changed the coming generation in ways we oldsters could not have anticipated and cannot turn back. The problem is that from the management end, the education system is really a funnel designed to ensure pliant workers and consumers for our magical hyper-capitalist singularity future, while also keeping the kids properly warehoused so their parents can work. And the higher education system is just a financialized grift, pushing kids into schools to get a piece of paper that they'll be paying for until they're fifty. It's credentialism as much as education or experience. And it's all about to change drastically anyway. Wait and see how many small colleges go broke over the next six to twelve months. But going forward:  what sorts of things do "we" want "our" kids to learn, and how much should they be charged against their futures for the privilege?


• Work. Who are the "essential" people? What specifically do they do that makes them essential? Are they paid accordingly? What role do you as a consumer have in all that? Should you pay a little for meat from your local butcher, or produce from your local grower, before supporting the factory-farm supply chain that coerces people back to dangerous, low-paying jobs? Do we want to "restore" the vaunted American manufacturing base? Well, here's the deal with that:  it cannot happen to scale unless and until we decouple health care access from employment status. That's all there is to it. Next time you're watching your friendly corporate or cable "news" broadcast, no matter which channel, no matter what time of day, watch it for at least a half-hour or an hour, and count how many health care commercials you see. I bet you didn't even notice until you started taking count.


• Money -- more specifically, wealth inequality. I've used this analogy many times before -- think of the economy as a massive circulatory system, and money is the blood. If you get too much concentrated in a single area, what happens to the body? Why did our elected representatives shovel trillions of dollars at people who were already obscenely wealthy, and will just hoard the money? They literally could have given every household $31k (based on a low-ball estimate of $4 trillion in economic assistance so far), and that money would have poured directly into the real economy. Shit, you could have picked four million people at random and given each of them $1M, as opposed to the equally arbitrary tactic of handing money to people who already had millions or billions. We have been bamboozled to believe that the Dow and the GDP are accurate barometers of the economy. They are not -- they are betting predictors for a handful of whales at the NYSE casino, where the house always wins, and if the shit blows up, well, Joe Sixpack will be forced to help them keep their extra vacation homes. In return, Joe gets his shitty health plan whittled away, and his pension fund ripped off. Same as it ever was.

It's easy to say that the idiots have dragged us all down with their nonsense, and certainly they have, but this has been a long time coming, and from many angles. The bestiary of American idiots is large and varied, from the coal-rolling shock troops heading into the cities (outside agitators) in the hopes of escalating violence and mayhem, to the hapless good-governance liberal dupe who still believes in institutional integrity and the rightness of their principles.

If this country had anything resembling moral leaders or a collective conscience, they would have been calling for Trump's resignation months ago. Instead you have a seedy subculture of hackcess journos pretending to protect the sanctity of the republic with their court stenography, working at the behest of publishers and editors-in-chief who are there explicitly to protect their own role as elite gatekeeper media -- that is, elites talking to each other, and thus setting the tone for "general discourse," but really just trying to make a horserace out of a corrupted process, in order to -- wait for it -- sell you more boner pills and big ol' trucks. Meanwhile, the "serious journos" hang on to the good stuff for their fucking books.

It's all slipping away, right in front of us, thanks to a deliberately engineered plutocratic insurgency decades in the making. The good news is, it's still up to you to some small extent, though this is almost certainly our last best chance to salvage what's left and try to start putting things back together. Ignore the polls, and the vicious, corrupt machinery that churns them out. Ignore the media's cynical spins and gutless hot takes. Remember that if your vote didn't matter, they wouldn't be trying so hard to cheat you out of it.

But you have to show every goddamned time, not just on Super Bowl Sunday. Everything from dog-catcher on up matters. That's how the fuckers got in charge at every level, because they took it seriously. Being a citizen is a job, and if you fail to show up or pay attention or take the right action at the right time, someone else will be more than happy to make those decisions for you.

No more excuses. Put up or shut up; fuck or walk. Make sure you can vote, and then bloody well do it, every time. You wanna make good trouble, that's the best kind.

Yes Please

Get a load of this fuckin' maroon:

So, I don't know who gets to break the bad news to the Commander o' Books, but even in a severe economic contraction, the People's Republic still accounts for almost fifteen percent of US GDP (last page of PDF in the link).

One in eight Americans live here in Cali, and we all get to sit back and watch, year after blessed year, as our tax dollars get siphoned away to keep the lights on in the parasite taker states, out there in Real 'murka.

Meanwhile, every year in the Golden State becomes more and more precarious, as more people keep coming in and our crumbling infrastructure gives way, in the face of climate change. Heat waves, wildfires, and rolling power outages all summer, followed by torrential rains and flash floods in the winter, and clean-up in the spring.

I wonder if some of that money we never get back from those fat cats in DC, our tax dollars that they use to keep the countless versions of Opioid Flats barely afloat, could be used here to shore up our own issues? I sure wouldn't mind finding out, and then Doctor Prepper there could take up the slack by showing the yokels how to build a smokehouse for curing roadkill, and filtering urine for drinking water. You know? Maybe if we weren't forced to prop up most of the south and midwest, we godless hedonistic sybarites might be able to keep our lights on and our heads above the rising water.

I've always had a bit of a grudging fascination with prepper culture, seriously. Perhaps it's the romanticized notion of living that rugged, contemplative, Grizzly-Adams-meets-Thoreau lifestyle of self-reliance that appeals to the Stoic gene. To be in the world but not of it, to watch the corrupt "civilized" world burn itself down while remaining safely out of the radius of effects is something that obviously appeals to people across a wide political and philosophical spectrum.

It's interesting, though, to note just how quickly all that went right out the window when the plague hit. These guys spend their whole lives supposedly training and preparing for that dystopian SHTF moment that fuels their lifestyle, and within weeks, boy, they were out in full force wailing about haircuts.

Where the hell do these people think all the toys they take for granted came from? The internet where they trade their dopey conspiracy theories and stupid ideas, the Twitter app where they heckle and jeer, the computers that they use to write and market their prepper books? That shit wasn't invented and developed out in Cooter's Huntin' Lodge, friendo, between rounds of moonshinin' and cousin-fuckin'. That was all college-edumacated elite types out here in the wild west.

I mean, is this guy kidding or what? I couldn't put a number on it with any precision, but I personally know more than a few native Californians who would be fine with breaking away. I sure as hell wouldn't mind. I resent being forced to support people who do nothing but talk shit about my state and the people in it. I would prefer if they just took their fucking welfare check, said "thank you," and went on about their goddamned way. But they won't. They never shut the hell up.

We grow every kind of crop here. We make every kind of product here. We're the fifth- or sixth-largest economy on the fuckin' planet, hoss. You need us, not the other way around. Don't kid yourself.

You want to pay off the national debt, start by demanding reparations from the Republicon Party and their billionaire tax cuts. Check the pockets on Grampa Walnuts' suit, and his family of grifters and ghouls. The fucking balls on these chumps, I swear to Christ.

They couldn't care less about the debt or deficit or any of it, until the Democrats control the gubmint, then they're all about the fiscal prudence. The sooner we just write these idiots off, omit them entirely from all serious policy discussions, and leave them to their masturbatory Red Dawn fantasies, the better off we'll all be -- even them.

Slope of Enlightenment

It would be difficult to put a number on just how many collective hours and column inches have been dedicated to assessing the various and sundry cognitive failings of one Jenius Q. Dealmaker, Fuckface in Charge, and Caudillo of Bedminster, First of His Name.

Clinical diagnoses abound:  the narcissistic personality disorder; oppositional defiance disorder; sociopathy; psychopathy; and on and on. And of course the ever-popular Dunning-Kruger effect, where stupid people are unaware of just how stupid they really are.

Certainly all of those ugly pathologies and more explain the smooth, diseased wad of oatmeal between his ears. But the armchair diagnoses give short shrift to the more immediate pathology at hand:

You, America. Fuck you.

Well, maybe not you personally, maybe not me personally. But take a week or several and make a partial list of all the fucked-up things El Caudillo has done and said over the past five years, and then remind yourself that once again, over forty percent of your fellow 'murkins are fine with it. They want more of it. They want you to have more of it.

Do they sound like the sort of people who can be reasoned with, who can be "met" in some proverbial "middle"? What is the middle on, say, Russia paying bounties to Islamic terrorists for American scalps? What would be the middle on defunding Social Security and Medicare? What is this middle people speak of, as applied to gassing suburban moms and kicking unarmed teenagers in the face, blinding journalists, extrajudicial domestic renditioning for civil disobedience?

That's just a few random items from the past six weeks or so. You know? A full reckoning would be damn near impossible.

The "middle" of a hog-shit lagoon still stinks of filth and disease. The "middle" of hell is still pretty fucking warm. Meeting Jeffrey Dahmer "in the middle" still results in someone ending up in the cooking pot.

Maybe I'm not being clear about this.

Every elected politician, no matter how "good" or "terrible," no matter how "smart" or "stupid," is a reasonably accurate reflection of their constituency. This is a truism that gets ignored all too often, especially by "moderate" or "conservative" Democratic politicians, who are forever trying to convince themselves, each other, and their donors, that "tacking right" on this or that petty social issue is better and more effective than, say, coming down unequivocally for something approaching economic justice for the rabble.

The reason Moscow Mitch and Leningrad Lindsey keep winning, even as they gleefully cut their constituents' throats and sell them down the river at every opportunity, is not because they're great guys doing a great job. It's because there are enough assholes who would rather undermine themselves and their families and communities, watching the exercise of raw power, than risk the chance of giving even one dollar to someone who they deemed undeserving. They would rather spend the rest of their lives wallowing in a pit of impotent bitterness and rage, than come to their senses and admit -- even just to themselves -- that they got rooked by a cheap, obvious con.

So El Caudillo's various cognitive pathologies and biases are also theirs, most acutely the aforementioned Dunning-Kruger effect. In an era where information is free and everywhere, if you are reasonably literate, then being an ignorant dupe is a choice.

You choose to watch the white-power rage-monkeys on Fox News, instead of reading an article -- or god forbid, a fucking book. You choose to forward the nonsense your idiot Facebook uncle sends you, without fact-checking a lick of it. You choose to chortle and snicker at His Travesty's increasingly desperate tweaks of an increasingly useless White House journamalists' pool, knowing that he's full of shit, knowing that you would never buy so much as a canned ham from this grotesque charlatan, much less a car or a house or health insurance coverage.

It's not just that "he's a dumb guy's idea of a smart guy," or "a poor person's idea of a rich person." His fans have that exact same vision of themselves. They decided long ago that they were much smarter than the average bear, so much so that they could decide for themselves what was "real" and what wasn't, who was telling the "truth" and who wasn't. They decided that the only person they could believe was a guy who's been telling provable lies his entire life, defying everyone to call him a fucking liar.

And now that we're chugging into a full-blown economic depression, a quarter-million dead by the end of the year, forty million already out of work, people waiting in line and online for basic goods, they're now distracting each other with some harebrained conspiracy theory about how everyone in Hollyweird is a SEX PREEVERT YOU GUYS WON'T YOU LISTEN?!

In their bizarro universe, celebrities such as Chris Cornell and Anthony Bourdain were "suicided" because they were on the verge of revealing this hidden truth. In that universe the Democrats, partly to protect their fellow child molesters but also just because they're assholes, have rigged this whole "plandemic," which will magically end on November 4th when Joseph "Satan" Biden is installed as the new antichrist. [cue Omen music]

It doesn't matter to them that there is far more photo and video evidence of Dear Leader palling around with Jeffrey Epstein (who was suicided) and Ghislaine Maxwell, or that Epstein literally lived next door to the rat-infested CoronaLago estate for years. They would rather believe that a pizza place that has no basement was running a child-trafficking ring out of its basement.

It takes a peculiar magnitude of cognitive bias to believe that on the one hand, the Dummycrats are too weak and impotent to electorally beat an obnoxious moron, while being simultaneously so omnipotent that they have forced the entire corporate media system and every other world leader to bend to their plandemic hoax. These idiots make 9/11 truthers look like the model of sanity and empirical probity.

They manage to get by in their little bubble, aided by an endless parade of self-loathing journos and politicians who cater to their "real 'murkin" pretensions. They're just as naked as their emperor has always been, long before he got into politics, and they're about to find out that there is an empirical reality, that this is not a simulation, that whether or not their monster manages to cheat and steal its way back in, a hard rain is gonna fall, and they better learn to swim.

This Is Us

However this movie ends -- and while my prediction wavers week-to-week, I think Biden squeaks through, though it will definitely get much uglier regardless -- it seems we may owe ol' Fuckface Von Clownstick a verrrry begrudging measure of gratitude. [pauses while readers collect their dropped jaws and exploded heads] Why? Hear me out.

1. The political system. Obviously it's a swamp of corruption and always has been, ever since it was an actual swamp waiting to be architected by some frog. But by simultaneously chanting the mantra "drain the swamp" while merely restocking it with his own gators, Trump forced observers to confront their own cynical assumptions about our political system, which is really just a vehicle for institutionalized graft and rentier capitalists, and to collectively turn away from it all with each of our assumptions, however individually divergent, confirmed. That is to say, whether you think it's more corrupt than ever, or whether you (amazingly) think he's doing everything he can to clean things up, your suspicions have been proven true to you.


2. The media ecosystem. The corporate (aka mainstream, "lamestream," ad nauseam) media are on their collective heels, ravaged by private equity vultures and by years of ad revenues lost to internet competitors. They are mostly just horse-race coverage now, vainly clinging to a transparent veneer of pretenses to some hallowed "fourth estate" principle they have rarely ever tried to live up to. It's just a rotating claque of fifty-percent prognosticators taking their tired opinions and slapdash analyses from panel show to panel show, and a gaggle of impotent losers stenographing lies and talking points (which are also lies).
   
   Nothing new is ever mined from these dismal pockets of (b)ore, just fools' gold. They are consistent only in the sheer paucity of original thought, and in the complete disconnect these bozos have from anyone with a real job -- so much so that they are routinely gulled, in their stupid Cletus safari articles, into collating either the marketing points of the chair of the Bumfuck County Republicon Party, or the foaming rants of some fist-shaking codger at a roadkill eatery.
   
   Mostly, though, the ease with which Trump has been able to render them as collectively supine, obedient, and utterly impotent, should make each and every media consumer out there wonder exactly what they're handing over their money and time for. Turns out they get paid whether or not they actually do their job -- or maybe being useless and compliant is their job after all. There's a Lucy-with-the-football dynamic in a lot of areas, and when it comes to the media and the average 'murkin, take a wild guess who's Charlie Brown.


3. The Republican party. Oh, if he loses they'll insist he was an aberration, an anomaly, a sui generis force they heroically endeavored to contain. The people who will be fooled by that want -- no, need -- to be fooled by it. There is nothing new in pointing out that Trump is simply the boorish but entirely practical culmination of GOP policies and strategy for the last fifty years -- steer racist whites into voting to let billionaires become trillionaires by hoovering ever more money out of the peons' pockets. That's all they've ever stood for in my lifetime, even counting Nixon's few liberal feints toward the EPA and such like. Anyone who continues to deny that at this point is either lying to you or to themselves. (Probably just to you, in order to profit for themselves. Because as we know, the only thing that matters in this world is money.)


4. The Democratic party. There are a few bright lights, but it's mostly a bunch of terrified bureaucrats more worried about losing their Wall Street donors than they are driven to motivate the burgeoning base of frustrated non-voters. I have no empirical data to support this, but I am convinced that for every lazy slob who just can't be bothered to give enough of a shit about anything to cast their lot, there is at least one other non-voter who is waiting for something or someone to vote for, rather than the evil of two lessers. I know because I was one of those people when I was young and foolish.
   
   Now that I am old and foolish, I can say that voting is definitely an exercise in futility, but one that would paradoxically become less futile in proportion with increased participation. In other words, the bastards keep winning because they are successful at discouraging you. Soon as you understand that it's not a one-time event, not the Super Bowl or the Kentucky Derby, but an endless exercise in process improvement, you focus on the dynamic aspect of improving the process, and the people who participate in it.
   
   For now, that means getting rid of the Republican party in its entirety, and putting the Democrats on notice. The old, entrenched entities of the party need to be made to understand that unless they are willing to fight for every inch of ground, they will be replaced at the earliest opportunity. Regardless, Trump has shown the current lineup for who and what they really are -- completely willing to spend months drafting performative bills to rot on Moscow Mitch's desk, but shrugging that there's simply nothing they can possibly do to counter or impede the open corruption of Trump and his dog Bill Barr. Either you use every power you have at your disposal, or you don't.


5. This is America. The COVID death count is about 160k at this point -- almost the combined total of WW1 and Vietnam. It will probably be over a quarter-million by the end of the year. Trump has found ways to be increasingly feckless and erratic throughout, getting worse and more brazen by the week, and his approval ratings have risen in the past couple weeks. He's made it clear he doesn't give a shit how many people die from this entirely preventable situation, and it's okay.
   
   You can make all the usual excuses about the media being in the tank or whatever, but there's no getting around this fact. Ignorant, nasty, spiteful people are fine with being ignorant, nasty, and spiteful. They've made a choice just like you and I make our choices. This is what they are, this is who they are. And when there's enough of them, to the extent that we humanize a nationalist mythos, imbue it with its own personhood and agency, it becomes a critical mass that determines what the country is, what it intends to be and do, what its role in the world should be and become. They have made themselves clear.
   
   The billionaires who really run this country, who own and operate the political system and all the nodes of information, make no secret that they hate you and me and everyone who isn't in their elite net-worth status. You're nothing but ignorant rabble to them, something to be manipulated and sold and used up as needed. They don't try to hide any of this. They would literally rather spend thirty or fifty percent of their precious profits subsidizing Rush Limbaugh or Fox News or some shithead think tank, than pay even one percent tax. That's just the way it is. You already know this.
   
   And it makes sense that Limbaugh or whoever is willing to take their money -- hell, I'd be happy to to take thirty million a year to do what he does (for a year anyway, before pulling the pin on that grenade and telling the audience to go fuck themselves), because you can bet when he finally kicks off, someone will take that job, and millions of broke peons with nothing to gain and nothing to lose will be happy to listen to whoever is willing to stoke their racial and class fears. It's a drug as potent as whatever strain of opioid is running through their dried-up towns this week, and they don't have anything else. That's the thing -- at least you can say Limbaugh and Hannity are in it for the money; to what extent is up for debate. But their listeners and viewers are cutting their own throats for free. (It's a small consolation to know that the billionaires and the talking heads they rent hate them too.)
   
   We'll see how it goes in ninety days, but unless it really is an unstoppable blue tsunami that completely eliminates these monsters, it might be time to consider that nations, like humans, have a lifespan, they run their course and then they turn to dust, and that maybe our individual lifespans are simply too short to keep at the futility of trying to talk suckers out of their tree. But again, as with the the above groups, Trump has clarified this dynamic for everyone.
   
   Liberals can no longer fool themselves into believing some tired variant of if only they knew. It should be clear by now that they know, and they're good with it, all of it. They want more of it. So maybe it's time to consider real estate prices on the Adriatic coastline or something. If this is how it is, then there's not really much you can do or say to change their minds. You can march in the streets and get your skull cracked and your eye shot out, maybe get whisked away by unmarked men in an unmarked van, maybe pull twenty years in Club Fed for throwing a rock at a Robert E. Lee statue. See what changes as a result of all that. How's it been working out so far?

I wish I had something more positive to say, but it's become impossible to have any faith or trust in any of this country's political leaders, media monkeys, or even average citizens. All the institutional bulwarks have failed, and all it took was someone with the nerve to completely ignore them. Too many people are simply too lazy and cynical to pull it together and change course, and that weighs down whatever idealism there is. I wish I was wrong more often than not. (If that was the case, then I'd probably have a cushy cable-pundit sinecure, or a NY Times column.) But you can feel free to go back through fifteen years' worth of archives, and you tell me what my batting average is.

I do think there is one last chance here to snatch the fat from the fire, but it will take dedication and commitment and consistency, for years after the election. This fight is not going away; they have a lot more money, and they use it weaponize that laziness and cynicism, and pit people with common interests against each other. Again, most people know all this already, but knowing something and acting in accordance with that knowledge are obviously two very different things, otherwise we wouldn't be where we are.

It takes more than a willingness to engage in the banal distractions of trying to convince some asshole on your Facebook feed or whatever. It takes voting with wallets, every day, as well as ballots every couple years. It takes sending periodic emails to companies and congress-critters alike, and letting them know where you draw those lines for yourself. If enough people did just those things -- which are free, and so many people have so much time on their hands now -- they would have to listen.

Either it's worth fighting and expending effort for, or it isn't.

So what's it gonna be?

Desaparecidos

If it is necessary to turn the country into a cemetery in order to pacify it, I will not hesitate to do so. -- Colonel Carlos Manuel Arana Osorio, President of Guatemala, 1970-1974

If you had "Portland becomes the Gaza Strip" on your 2020 bingo card, congratulations. In fact, as this summer of mostly police-escalated riots in putatively "liberal" or "Democratic" cities has progressed, the patterns and rhythms are similar from city to city, and are playing a familiar tune.

Even so, Portland stands out in that group. A famously progressive city, the largest city in its state by far, with a liberal Democratic mayor and city council, in a state with majority Democratic state legislators and congressional representatives, a liberal governor (Jerry Brown's sister, no less), and two liberal US senators.

So how's all that working out for them? Aside from a sharply worded letter from Jeff Merkley to Bill Barr (which the latter no doubt promptly wiped his ass with) and a few acerbic phrases from Nancy Pelosi, what precisely is anyone in the Democratic Party doing about the in-your-face authoritarianism, anonymous goon squads in full military gear hustling suspected graffiti artists into rental vans with Florida plates without so much as a word? What the fuck is the Border Patrol doing hundreds of miles from the Canadian border, much less the Mexican one, and in what way is this sort of activity within their scope of work?

It is already being hinted that the counterinsurgency ops (let's call them what they are) in Portland are essentially a proving ground for expansion into other cities -- again, all governed by Democrats -- experiencing the thrill of, ah, "social unrest." Never mind that in hundreds of documented incidents across the country, it has consistently been the various strains of militarized "law enforcement" types who have escalated peaceful protests into violent conflagrations. (Strange how they're always able to find a way to disarm and subdue white nutjobs without any bloodshed, though.)

Which is, of course their goal:  the best way to undermine these movements is to crack skulls, and then discredit the protesters by painting them as rioters and anarchists. And why not? Who's going to stop them?

It's also a practice run for November, in case the election isn't enough of a blowout, and Dear Leader decides not to accept the results. Sounds like a paranoid conspiracy theory? Okey-dokey. I would say that it's unlikely, but by no means impossible. Take a moment and reflect on just how many things over the past four years have occurred, that prior to 2016 you had considered "unthinkable."

It's been three full weeks since it became known that the Russians have been paying Islamic militants to murder American soldiers in Afghanistan -- and not only has no one called for Trumps' resignation, or written up some sort of protest legislation or censure, as far as I can tell, no major media figure has even asked him about it. The same sinecured dipshits that whined for weeks about Obama wearing a tan suit simply cannot be bothered to ask about openly treasonous conduct. If that isn't a stone-cold indicator of where we're at right now, I really don't know what is. We need journalists who give a fuck, just as much as we need politicians who give a fuck.

John Lewis was a giant among men, channeling his righteous anger into a storied career in public service. Seeing him side-by-side with Martin Luther King, both looking so young, Lewis especially at just twenty-three, but focused and committed. The man took dozens of beatings for his commitment and his principles, things that are certainly lost on the thugs currently infesting the executive branch, and the mangy guard dogs who strain at the leash to do their bidding.

Here's yet another example, and you can find hundreds more from the past couple months if you do a little bit of searching. Look at these brave men, bravely beating down this violent anarchist. So fucking brave, really. I honestly don't know how someone does something like that, just this incredibly chickenshit deed, and then goes home and resists the urge to eat their sidearm. I mean, you have to be a real die-hard fucking turd of a human being to withstand the temptation. These thugs can go straight to hell, seriously. Their very worst fear is a fair fight.

They should rename the Edmund Pettus bridge after John Lewis, like, years ago, but certainly now. Pettus was a dirtbag piece of shit who died thirty-some years before the bridge was even built. It was never his bridge to begin with. Some shitheads named it after him just tell everyone else fuck you. Once John Lewis walked across it, it became his bridge, now and forever.

It would be nice to think that Lewis' epic courage and commitment might inspire a generation of Americans, decent people who are at long last exhausted by the wretched hive of scum and villainy that has at long last taken over this plague-ridden cesspool. I guess we'll see in November.

Despite Rep. Lewis' stellar example, I remain skeptical that street demonstrations actually accomplish anything. Yes, they raise consciousness and awareness and all that. I'm talking about tangible, identifiable changes as a direct result.

The main thing is, I'm not willing to do it myself, and I don't ask other people to do something I'm unwilling to do myself. There is nothing here that I'm willing to get my skull cracked for, or shuttled away in an unmarked van for this domestic extraordinary rendition program we apparently now have going, and that again, no one will do jack shit about.

There is no goddamned way I'm going to get my head caved in for fuckin' Nancy Pelosi or Joe Biden or any of those people. The day they risk anything to fight for me will the the first such day. They get my vote because they manage to be slightly less awful, but that's the extent of it. No one should have to sacrifice their bodies or lives in order to motivate people who, for whatever reason, cannot be motivated otherwise to simply show up and do the right thing.

All that said, if someone is determined to get out in the streets and confront the fascist thugs, I would recommend a couple of things that might seem dumb and insignificant, but could make a difference:

1. Flag swag. Carrying a full-size flag, like some Skokie-marching skinhead, would be unnecessarily cumbersome. Put some flag patches on your clothes. Wear a flag-design mask or t-shirt. No sayings or jokes or hortatory rhetoric. Just do it. It makes it a lot harder to paint someone as some commie pinko anarchist.
2. Bring a gun. I'm not remotely kidding about this one. Especially in Portland -- Oregon is an open-carry state, you just can't carry a loaded weapon in Portland city limits. You can make fun of the doughy neckbeards with their Meal Team Six getups and their DURRR MUH GUNZ dick fetish all you want, but you know what? The cops never fuck with those guys, do they?

Weirdly, I seem to be finding new levels of contempt for certain people. Trump is easy meat; the guy's been a shithead since his mother shat him on the piss-stained concrete of a Hell's Kitchen drug alley. Anyone with functioning synapses sees him for what he is and despises him for all of it.

Then you have the people who are willing to be in the same room with him and sell out their country on a daily basis, for a goddamned paycheck. These are awful people who should never hold a decent job again.

But it's the people who are willing and eager to commit violence on his behalf, the thugs and bullies who look forward to "tuning up" anyone who dares to cross them. I don't know what wrong turn such people made in their lives where they end up like that, but I do know that we're all less safe with such people being allowed to carry deadly weapons and use them with no accountability.

Stay safe. Know who the bastards are and deny them your money as well as your brain. Show up in November, and every single time afterward.