Tuesday, March 24, 2015

Shouting at the ocean, draining the swamp

Whilst I try and come up with a fun and interesting post about Northwest landslides I wanted to take a moment and consider this:
It's from the political data-nerd site Five Three Eight by way of Gin and Tacos (one of my favorite political snark sites, by the way) and pretty much says in a single image everything I need to say about why I have completely lost interest in blogging or anything else about U.S. politics and foreign/military policy.

I mean, fucking look at it and consider the implications for politics in this country and those of us who don't consider a job as the upstairs maid in the Big House as a preferential career option.

In the GOP circa 2015 Dick Nixon, the old Red-baiter and original ratfucker, would be a liberal too flaming to be considered for a job as handshaking door-greeter at CPAC. Bush 41 is damn near Dukakisesque and even Dubya, DUBYA!...that brain-dead chickenhawk Reagan fellator, is to the Left of the typical GOP Congresscritter today. Ted Cruz down there at the bottom - a hominid lifeform closer to the average Teatard than any of these other mooks - is so far Right that he can practically see Francisco Franco shaking his dead ass at him from Hell.

THIS is today's GOP. THIS is the face of American "conservatism", a form of political life so far from the sort of Eisenhower Republican that I was introduced to by my father the Master Chief as to be unrecognizable. Me trying to understand today's "republicans" would be like going to work one day and opening the front door only to be met by a mob of Ubangi warriors shaking feathered spears and leaping about shouting what to me would be incomprehensible gibberish.

These are people who believe in Gilded Age crony capitalism, in the rapacious greed of John D. Rockefeller. These are people who believe in the primacy of invisible sky-gods, that people who aren't Christian, who aren't heterosexual, who aren't plutocract-starfuckers - who aren't them, in other words - are untermenschen to be driven out and exterminated to the degree possible. These are people who believe that anyone who doesn't believe in their ideal of white, Christian, imperial, Gilded Age America is a "traitor" and "unAmerican".

These are people who look at all the work that "liberals" have done to drain the goddamn malarial swamp that was the United States in 1929 for all of us not born into the two-yacht families. To rein in predatory oligarchs and vulture capitalists, to try and make work safer and more lucrative, old age kinder and less penurious, sickness rarer and less impoverishing...and see this all as a fucking bad thing.

I have nothing whatsoever to say to, or about, these people, except "Fuck you".

What the hell is there to say? They're utterly and vilely, criminally wrong, in my view. They're the dead hand of an older United States, a zombie nation we thought the New Deal and Civil Rights had buried in the graves of John C. Calhoun and Mark Hanna, arisen and shambling to the polling place to cast their ballots for the necromancers that gobbled their brains and replaced them with a toxic stew of triumphalism, grievance, hatred and stupidity.

They show no interest in compromise or accommodation. If they can't have the U.S. they want they appear perfectly ready to burn it down and dance their Ubangi war-dance in the ashes.

They are a third of my fellow citizens and they are utterly uninterested in what I have to say here. "Talking" to them is like shouting at the ocean.

And, in fact, I don't want to "talk" with them. They themselves assure me that they not only have no interest in my America but that they want to wreck it, destroy it, replace it with their own version of 1890 only with more fighter-bombers and fast-food fry cooks instead of breaker boys and match girls.

I don't want to "talk" about that. Why the fuck should I? There's nothing to "talk" about. I want to destroy that, that entire notion, that the very idea that a neo-imperial, neo-Gilded-Age America is not just possible but desirable. I want to cut off its fucking head and sew the mouth shut over a garlic bulb and then bury the headless body at a crossroads and sew the gravedirt with fucking salt.

But this blog isn't the place to do that. Frankly, if you can't see how undesirable the notion is to return this country to the economic, political, and social conditions of 1894 on its face then I can't say a goddamn thing here to change your mind. All I'd be doing is shouting at the waves and with about as much benefit; I'd get hoarse and angry and the waves don't give a shit.


Or, to put it another way; I'm too pissed off about the fucking swamp to bother wasting my time here trying to argue with the fucking alligators.

6 comments:

Leon said...

See, all it took was a brain-damaged neanderthal announcing his campaign for presidency and you've got something to write!

Anonymous said...

Whatever happens here in the future, I gotta say, it will be of interest.

bb

FDChief said...

Yeah, well, isn't there supposed to be a Chinese curse that goes something along the lines of "May you live in interesting times."?

Ael said...

Speaking of interesting times, just be glad American politics are a lot simpler and more transparent then Yemen's

There but for the grace of god.

Anonymous said...

:::shakes head:::: I want to print that little bit of political art-form on a large piece of of very heavy paper, roll it up and BEAT people with it. The very people who screamed Godwin's Law at me (tho' I did not mention Hitler, mind you) when I accused the GOP of moving in a Fascist direction.

It seems nobody takes political philosophy anymore, so they don't know the main signs of fascism do not include screaming in German....

FDChief said...

Whenever I think about the Republican approach to governance I think of Bernard Shaw's little speech in Caesar and Cleopatra:

CAESAR (seeing Apollodorus in the Egyptian corner and calling to him). Apollodorus: I leave the art of Egypt in your charge. Remember: Rome loves art and will encourage it ungrudgingly.

APOLLODORUS. I understand, Caesar. Rome will produce no art itself; but it will buy up and take away whatever the other nations produce.

CAESAR. What! Rome produces no art! Is peace not an art? Is war not an art? Is government not an art? Is civilization not an art? All these we give you in exchange for a few ornaments. You will have the best of the bargain.

That We the People hand our art over to these goddamn Philistines never ceases to enrage me.