Tuesday, September 24, 2019

Tuesday, September 24, 2019

"The Boss was a certified monster who deserved to be impeached & banished. He was a truthless creature - a foul human monument to corruption & depravity on a scale that dwarfs any other public official in American history."
 - Hunter S. Thompson, Kingdom Of Fear: Loathsome Secrets of a Star-Crossed Child in the Final Days of the American Century.
 Well, well. Well, well, well. What an afternoon. I left the house this afternoon to see the Therapist & while all that was going on, all hell broke loose.



 You've seen the news. You know what's going on. By the time I got started with the monthly chat, the various newspaper alerts on my phone told me what was going down. I hadn't sat down before the Therapist asked if I'd heard the news. And even then, I didn't get to really take on this thing for another hour. I honestly had to step away & think.

 These are Interesting Times, friends & neighbors, we all must watch our step. Shit's got real. Regardless of the impact on the cultural hivemind, we're dealing with people who will send young men & women to kill a bunch of people & destroy their shit to distract the rest of us from a crooked asshole getting his for being a crooked asshole in a sloppy manner.

Because make no mistake, beloved: Donald Trump is a Crooked Asshole. In that, he's not unique. We're a society that makes kings of our Crooked Assholes. For all our lofty talk of the Good & Holy, the Right Way To Live, a story centuries old, right from the very beginning, we have followed the Crooked Assholes. And no one makes Crooked Assholes more interesting than the U.S. of Good Ol' A.

 Unfortunately for the country, the world & maybe the whole concept of America, God Shed His Grace On Thee, Donald Trump is a particularly stupid & greedy asshole, the likes I know we haven't seen in my lifetime & maybe haven't experienced since we thought the Creator blessed certain bloodlines to lead. Yes, George W. Bush was a mass murder for allowing it to happen, but let's not pretend the U.S. hasn't thirsted for the blood of others almost since the get-go.

 No, America (GSHGOT) can survive a bit War's Glory because that's what it's designed to do. We lust for it, like no flesh has for other flesh. Our Original Sin, we all carry some of that collective guilt, & you do no one or no thing any good to deny it. We have massacred entire states into the Union because we really liked pineapples, for cryin' out loud.

 But Trump's Crooked Assholery, laced with Pig Ignorance & Base Greed... ahh, that is something special, & it's too our sin that we've ignored that little nugget of wisdom for far too long. His election, maybe even his nomination by one of the two national parties, & the one that's supposed to be "hard-nosed" serious one - or at least not the puerile one - is a Time Point Zero/Dragon Break/reshuffling of the continuity for the American Political System. Not the first nor the last, but definitely one, & a uniquely trashy & vain & avaricious. He was famous for being a dirty landlord, that's why you fools voted for him.

  Hell, he might not even finish his first term before he's tossed into the street if he's lucky. If not, he could be the first president of the United States of America - the last, best (?) hope for mankind - to not only get removed from office, but jailed for High Crimes, Misdemeanors, Gross Vulgarity & Common Dumbness.

 We live in a country where people quote this self-same president when they decide to go out & kill a bunch of people who were just doing their weekly shopping or trying to feed their family, all because they (in the gunman's mind) Don't Belong. This happens regularly & we spend more time arguing if we should still sell the gun regularly used in these cases or maybe think about slowing down the flood a bit. We have many, many more people who're may not have the sand to do it themselves, but will agree, even if sadly, that that's what we're Forced to do.

 Trump is their Dumbass God, the King of Fools & the Craven Emperor of Tediously Predictable. Before Nancy Pelosi put the vice-grip on his nuts, he mocked a 16-year-old girl who's just trying to make the air cleaner & the sea less full of garbage, & the hooting buffoons who think, nay demand he be considered not only qualified but also deified thought it was a Sick Burn.

 They are cheering on his current behavior, the very thing that made Pelosi, Chuck Schumer, Adam Schiff, & the Democratic Party in general decide it no longer wanted to cut bait, because of course they will. You know, for all the complaints, Twitter is a wonderful tool for at least getting an if-not-complete, then a sizable portion of the voting population's opinion. People say it isn't real life not wanting to acknowledge that if we said it was - which it is - we're just as guilty of being feckless wise asses who wouldn't say that out loud if someone were around to slap us.

 So, you get Uncut Humanity. People wanting to piss you off, to Own you. To show they're wiser, smarter, more controlled, more centered, more clever, more sanguine, more human than you. You get, in short, everyone trying to be the best Crooked Asshole they can be. They like it. They think it's groovy.

 Whew. What a rush, huh? I was in my early '20s when the GOP went after Clinton. I had already started my journey Leftward but was quite frankly too busy living like a rock star on a budget to play close enough attention, & even then I was already Too Left to give much of a shit for Clinton. I do remember being completely unruffled that the slick bastard mange to skate through with only a few welts & a higher approval rate we wouldn't see again until Obama came along.

 The same way I wasn't shocked that Bush Junior, who allowed perhaps the most catastrophic military grindhouse since World War 2 to flourish, one with no end in sight, managed to slip the noose & become Michelle Obama's Lovable Goofball Buddy. War is America's business, killing other people is one of the very few things that draws us all together, especially if we think they deserve it.

 I must seek hydration. This is an exhilarating stroke. Imagine being right in the middle of it? This is where we see the rubber hit the road, where money talks & bullshit walks. Whether... whatever it is we have - Democracy? Republic? Oligarchy? Capitalism? Socialism? Some sort of misshapen, amorphous concoction of them all - not whether it survives or we survive, but what it becomes & how we deal with it. Who will go down? Who will be fed to the pursuing bears? This weird, twisted White House, this cut-throat viciousness that Washington has always been, we have Interesting Times, indeed.

 Or will it all be... nothing? People had so much juju with the Mueller Report & only a fool wouldn't think Our Fellow Americans aren't as hep to How It All Works as we'd like to believe, this could be much ado about nothing? Even so, Clinton & Andrew Johnson were impeached & life went on. It's going to be a slog, in any event, & there's an even weirder screwhead waits in the wing, probably nursing a huge schadenfreude boner rarin' to go. This is politics, gentle ones; put on a fuckin' helmet.

 As this happened so late in the day, when most people were getting ready to go home & try to forget the rest of the world exists until tomorrow starts it all over again, we're still grappling with what all this means. Because even if the greasy son of a bitch gets a mulligan because enough of the American Government is equally as Blighted & Mendacious as Trump & his foul crotch spawn - not to mentioned the cheap thugs & dickheads who actually choose to work for him - to let shit like, say, an unnecessary catastrophe of a war or gross, law-flaunting rapacity, squeak through like a fart in church.

 And the media? Well, this is new ground, kids. This Beast known as the Mainstream Media, we didn't have this 20 years ago. The internet was a New Thing & not everyone had a super computer in their pocket & people other than dipsticks took clowns like Rush Limbaugh seriously. Only the Weird communicated on line in any form or fashion. I was there, I know. Now? I can talk video games with a woman in England or country music with someone in Brazil or share a little soul with a guy way out where the buses don't run.

 Here Be Dragons, children, watch your ass.

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