Chaos agents

When radical right-wing nuts run wild and destroy the functionality of the People's House it may be all in good fun.

But when they do the same thing in the public square?

No, it's not. 

These wingnuts aren't elected, though. They're bought and paid for, hired supposed-servants of the public, our "Thin Blue Line" of coppers that supposedly stand between us the Good People of the Earth and anarchy.

What's their beef?

Well, mostly, it seems, that lots of even the Good People don't like them. Here's their spokescop from the linked piece:

“They’re doing what they were asked to do. The public said they wanted less police involvement. The (Portland) School Board kicked them out of the schools. At some point, people should look in the mirror and take responsibility for who they voted for.”

Okay, first; fuck you runnin', you lying Dick Tracy wannabe.

No, the coppers weren't "asked to do" less policing.

They were "asked" to do less shitty, racist, violent, assholish policing. The kind of policing that the Portland Police Bureau had (and has) done for decades. The kind of policing that got them in dutch with the feds and won them a sort of supervised parole agreement that they've conspicuously ignored.

So, yes; I agree with one point Duin makes in his piece; part of the problem is that the Portland cops are way understrength. There's just too few cops for the number of troubled people running around in public.

But one big reason the PPB is so understaffed is that nobody wants to work for the outfit that a large number of Portlanders neither trust nor respect, largely because of that outfit's own shitty behavior. The Bureau attracted lots of violent, racist assholes because that's how they rolled; those people felt welcomed and at home there.

When large numbers of Portlanders weren't okay with that anymore, those sorts of people had a little hissy and left, or never joined.

And the Bureau has not changed enough to attract any other kind of person.

But here's the thing; like I pointed out earlier in this series; even before their little quiet quitting the Portland cops didn't do a pantsload of "policing". In Duin's piece he cites what's supposed to be a devastating statistic:

"As officers focus on homicides and shootings in the city, property crimes are generally ignored: The bureau’s clearance rate for property crimes dropped from 17.1% in 2009 to 4.4% in 2021..."

Okay, now, four percent is pretty crap.

But notice the clearance rate in the Good Times?

Yeah. Less than a fifth of all thefts - burglaries, car clouts, thievery in general - got solved. That was the "big time" stat for Portland cops. That was their championship season. That was them killing it.

And the perps?

Largely dopers and hoboes. "Professional" thieves, like all professionals in any field, probably make up a pretty small minority of all thieves.

So basically these are poor people who can't or won't work for a living stealing stuff to by food and dope.

And what have We the People done to make that less attractive as a way to get by?

I'll wait.

Here's the point.

It's not fucking rocket science. How do we move towards making this problem less of a problem?

Well, having better cops would help. Burning the existing Bureau to the ground and rebuilding it with fewer shitty, violent, Proud Boy-loving MAGAts and racists.

Then getting the new coppers better, smarter training and methods to deal with people. Getting them more help; Portland Street Response - a program designed to give public safety options other than sending armed coppers to deal with loonies and drugged-out whackos - has been underfunded and mis- or un-used since it was set up. Duin notes correctly that the Detox Center - the tank where narced-out gomers used to get dumped in to get them off the street - has never been reopened.

(Possibly because it's worth noting that the coppers used it as an unlicensed jail. People who didn't meet the bar for actual jailing used to be dumped in Detox, where they could be held for a day without charge. It was partially that sort of abuse that got it closed in the first place.)

But, again...and I know this keeps coming back around every time I write these things...the real issue is money.

Money to find these dopers and hobos work. To get them off the dope. To make places to live. To pay for more courts and diversion programs and Street Response unarmed intervention squads and rehab centers and social workers and daycare and school programs and...well, about a gajillion other social services.

And, yes; cops. And jails.

The bottom line out in Portland Streets isn't really that much different than in the U.S. House of Representatives.

We know what needs to happen to make our lives in general better.

But there's a vocal minority who refuse to consider that loudly being short-sighted, greedy, selfish assholes is not, actually, good public policy, and they continue to stand athwart those things shouting "stop".

In Congress they posture and preen and shove their prejudice and superstition into legislation to prevent anything they hate from happening. Far better to do nothing than to do anything the 14th Century wouldn't approve of.

In Portland they refuse to tax themselves and to allow anyone else to consider how best to use those tax monies to make those changes I've laid out. Far better to piss and moan about homelessless and crime than to make Nike go short a dime.

And until those chaos agents - in both places - are ignored and despised and discarded, we're going to be stuck right where we are.

As Duin says; welcome to the jungle.

The problem being, the problem that he doesn't mention, is that among us are those who are objectively pro-tiger.

America Worst

Long before Orange Foolius and his gang of GQP nitwits adopted it, the slogan "America First" was the boast of another gang of fascist-fluffing traitors.

That would be Charles "Lucky Lindy" Lindbergh and the original, isolationist version.

The Wiki entry at the link cited claims that most of the Forties Firsters were genuine isolationists who didn't want the nation to get involved in "foreign wars".

That's fine. I'm all for not getting involved in other people's wars, or wars, period, if it comes to that.

On the other hand, there are some people who have some ideas or goals rotten enough that only killing enough of them will stop them, and those people will force wars on you whether that's a good idea or not.

The bulk of the original Firsters recognized that; the outfit killed itself on December 11, 1941 when it became brutally obvious who those really rotten people were. 

That brings us to the ongoing war in Ukraine.

I'm not going to make a case for war. Or that war. Or for Americans to fight, kill, and die in that, or any war not forced upon us.

If I was going to make that argument I'd be learning Ukrainian on my way to volunteer to run a battery fire direction center for Сухопу́тні військá Збрóйних сил Украї́ни. 

I'm not, and so I refuse to be a hypocrite and cheer for other people's sons and daughters to go and fight.

But.

There doesn't seem to be any gray area on which side as Americans we should be fighting for if it comes to fighting, and it sure as fuck isn't Vlad Putin and his gang. My compa the Rude Pundit pretty much sums it up:

"Here's the thing: I've been watching the United States fund bullshit fascists and totalitarians my entire fucking life. In Latin America, in Africa, in the Middle East, this country has provided arms and money to the worst goddamn people and the most worthless causes. We've funded mercenaries and weapons manufacturers. We've funded crazed terrorists by calling them "insurgents" and funded evil militaries crushing freedom-fighting insurgents. 

What Zelensky did was say to us, to we who live in this goddamned ludicrously powerful country in this goddamned ludicrously debased age, that we're supposed to represent some fucking ideals to the rest of the world. Look, Zelensky said, your mythology is based on real shit that happened, real battles with real lives and real consequences. Now we have this battle against this enemy. The consequences for failure would be genocide and expanded aggression by the lunatic Putin. For the US to walk away would be shameful. It would make us an accessory to mass murder, even more than we usually are."

Yes. Ohhellyes.

We now have the same choice that We the People faced in 1939. Do we help out the dictator whose people will - who are - cheerfully butchering anyone in their conquests they can catch? Or do we help the people fighting those sonsofbitches?

It's not really a hard choice.

The Ukrainians don't have to be great. And they aren't; there's a lot of post-Soviet fuckery there.

But they sure as Hell are better than the actual Putin-led post-Soviets.

And that brings me to the Latter-Day America Firsters.

That's a couple of them there; January 6th traitors; Matt Gaetz and Lauren "I luv gunz" Boebert during the speech that the ;leader of Ukraine gave to the joint session of Congress. The Wordle of that day must have been a real toughie; both the little rascals are still glued to their phones during the applause lines. 

But that's just another day at the shop for the New Firsters. It's part of their job as the Putin Wing of the GQP, to stan for a criminal fascist.

Well, hell; if you're gonna rep for Donald Trump, how is Putin a stretch?

Look. There's no such thing as a "good war". I can certainly understand being on the fence about, say, the war in Yemen. There's a lot of bad and no real good options there. Most wars are a choice between worse and even worse.

But here?

Fuck that noise.

We shipped millions of tanks and trucks to that rotten bastard Stalin to beat that rotten-er bastard, Hitler because it was in our national interest.

To send arms and ammo to Zelensky - who is not anywhere near as rotten as Stalin - to beat that rotten bastard Putin is a no-brainer.

Unless you're a MAGAt-loving, QAnon-huffing, Putin-fluffing GOP shitweasel.

Like these two and the other Firsters, the Cosplay Mossy Oak Militia (thanks, Jim Wright!) and all the other Putin Fanbois?

You know how I keep saying these people are traitors?

Well, if you were an original Firster and you still had your Adolf poster up on the wall on December 12?

Yeah. You were a traitor.

Who's gonna tell these people about that?

Their domestic policies, such as they are, are enough to make me loathe them. But to prefer a brutal foreign dictator over a flawed but still-better polity that dictator is invading?

The new Firsters are...what their Adolf-loving predecessors were. 

I'll let the Rude One see me out here:

"That's why the conservatives who dangle from Putin's taint hair went crazy. It's because they say constantly that the United States is the greatest country in the history of everything. They say all the time that we are something special. And we're saying, and Zelensky is imploring, that we fucking well act like it once in a while. Sometimes even a superpower has to put the fuck up or shut the fuck up."

The Politics of Stupid

So here's what's been bugging me.

This past November the voters of Oregon went marginally in favor - 50.6 to 49.4 - of a ballot measure, 114, that imposed some restrictions on firearms.

Those included:

• requiring permits issued by local law enforcement to buy a firearm;
• requiring photo ID, fingerprints, safety training, criminal background check, and fee payment to apply for a permit; and
• prohibiting manufacturing, importing, purchasing, selling, possessing, using, or transferring ammunition magazines capable of holding more than 10 rounds and make violations a class A misdemeanor.

 And y'know what?

That's just fine as far as I'm concerned. 

It doesn't infringe the "right to keep and bear arms". It infringes the non-right to keep and bear certain types of magazines, to keep and bear arms without being evaluated for things like criminal records or knowing how to use the fucking things, and being on record so that IF your bang-stick gets used for bad purposes it can be chased back to you.

If I'd have been the ballot measure writer I'd have added some of Jim Wright's "bang bang sanity" proscriptions like making "accidental" shootings crimes that would lose you your "right" to fuck up other people with the weapon you obviously don't know how to use and have no business having and requiring people to store the things like we did in the Army, locked up right.

So vox populi vox Dei, right? Gonna get right on that, sheriff. Right?

No.

Because if you're a wingnut ammosexual then the public spirit only bloweth where wingnut fap-memes listeth, and so, of course, a judge in West Buttfuckistan (or Harney County, which is effectively the same thing...) heard a suit brought by a bunch of these clucks and, of course, has been hammering down Measure 114 because...reasons.

Well.

I don't really need to go over - again - why fewer people with smaller, slower, less capable firearms is good.

It's the same reasons that a NASCAR-grade Camero isn't street legal. What soldiers need in war is the exact opposite of what Sparky needs behind the counter of the 7-Eleven.

But because the Right has spent more than sixty years grooming these chucklefucks to scree like wounded eagles anytime some sensible reduction in the mad carnival of firearms is proposed here in the Land of the Free trying to make that obvious fact a reality is damn near impossible.

Different day, same nitwit wingnut shit, though, right?

Here's the problem with just shrugging about that.

These dopes are making life harder for all of us, and not just about firearms.

Some of the things they want - more racism, more prejudice, more ignorance, more misogyny - are 1) irritating and vile as well as 2) predictable, but are baked into them and can only be ignored when trivial and mocked and slammed down when violent. 

Any sensible government - any sensible organization - can and will do that. Even corporations, sociopathic sonsofbitches that they are, realize that gays and immigrants and dusky people buy toasters, so being associated with redneck shitbirds is bad for business.

No. It's the other political obsessions that they're being talked into now that are so fucked up.

These ammosexual rule-free Days of Jubilee are one of them.

If you think we're bad here in Oregon look at Florida, where their Wingnut Jesus wants to enact "constitutional carry", meaning that any and everyone can walk around strapped. No rules, no license, no training, no nothing.

Imagine how your average rural Florida deputy sheriff - Nobel Prize winning philosopher and gentle soul that he will be - is going to act now that EVERYone he meets is packing heat?

You think we're way ahead of the mean on copper shooting of randos now?

Oh, and try pulling that shit if your skin color is marginally darker than a sheet of notebook paper.

Fuuuuuucccccckkkkkk.

But even beyond how fucked up that is, is the wingnut neediness to repeal the 20th Century.

When I was learning my trade, an older engineer told me that things like building codes and design requirements were enacted "one death at a time".

Because we would do our best to head off fucked up things like deadly building fires or earthquake collapses based on our best guess on how bad those fires or earthquakes could get.

Then a worse fire or earthquake would come along, kill a bunch of people, we'd learn from that and revise our codes and designs to head off those worse fires and earthquakes.

If you look at public health and safety rules - things like OHSA regs, vaccination requirements, medical practice - between 1900 and 2000 you see a fairly broad, if uneven, progression from "we don't understand and couldn't do anything even if we did" to "oh, okay, here's what's happening and here's how we can prevent or mitigate that."

No everyone was on board with that - look back at the "polio monkey serum" shit that the Birtchers ran with back in the 1940s and 50s - but the public in general agreed; safer is better in the general sense.

So it was less fun to drive with seatbelts and sober. But it was safer for everyone.

It wasn't much fun to get measles shots. But it was safer than getting measles, safer for everyone.

It was more irking to have guards on saws, and rules for ladders. Some things - like the tipping toddler on 5-gallon buckets, seemed even silly and excessive.

Taking the handle off the pump sucked. But shitting yourself to death from cholera sucked worse.

The general public consensus was that this stuff was a minor issue compared to, say, dying horribly of smallpox and cholera or being paralyzed by polio.

Now that consensus is in ruins, and it's for a simple, horrible, stupid reason;

Because the political right's policy goals are subjectively shit - plutocracy, oligarchy, theocracy - they need red cultural meat to feed their C.H.U.D. hordes, something like 40% of the U.S. public, and they've chosen things like democracy, equity, and, yes, public health to feed this ignorant beast.

As the linked article points out, it's killing those CHUDs.

And, as the article also points out, the CHUDs don't care. 

If those cultural "wins" kill those they hate and "own the libs"?

They'll die happy.

How the fuck do you fight that?

That's whackadoodle cult thinking.

That's hashishin thinking, the kind of thinking that made blissed-out drug-addled assassins that you had to kill to stop.

And, as I've also said here before, if that is the case...

...and I believe it is...

...the implication is that our choices are grim; give up all the social and political and economic and even medical gains of the 20th Century,

or,

Kill them.

I know which I think is the worse option.

But I also know that I'm rolling a massive rock uphill to even begin to clue the vast bulk of my supposedly-fellow citizens in that that's even a possibility, much less a necessity.

And so here we are.

They will kill us before they let us take the fucking handle off the fucking pump.

And that, my friend, is a Peak Fucking Stupid way to die.

Bang Bang Crazy: Supreme Court Conclusion

 

On Thursday, June 23, 2022, six of the justices of the Supreme Court of the United States wrote the conclusion to my little thread about the butchery that took place inside an elementary school in Texas almost exactly a month earlier.

And that conclusion was: we're wingnuts and we love guns, so fuck you.

It's really just that simple.

The modern "conservative" movement loves them some guns. Big guns, little guns, old guns, new guns...guns are what gives them wood. There is no firearm that the current SCOTUS majority considers too risky, too dangerous, too lethal, for some mouth-breathing peckerhead to carry around the public square.

Why? Because there's a good reason for mouth-breathing peckerheads to stroll about armed like a Nung mercenary?

Fuck, no.

It's because ammosexuals - people who get their rocks off having badass weaponry - are a crucial voting element of the Republican criminal conspiracy.

Without the gun-humpers, the racists, the incels, the bible-bangers, no Republican would ever get elected. Ever. Again.

So this is them throwing brains to their zombie horde.

There is no other reason.

They give fuck-all about the people who are going to die, who are going to live miserable lives with the damage the bullet will do to their arms or legs or guts (have you ever seen a gunshot wound? Unless it's from a peashooter .22 it's not a nice neat little hole. High-velocity ammunition shreds human meat and splinters bone. It commonly leaves you crippled and in pain for the rest of your life) or the grief of loss and rage at the insult to minds, lives, and bodies those firearms and the mouth-breathing peckerheads who will soon be humping them everywhere will do.

And don't even get me started on how the already-twitchy trigger fingers of the cowardly cops will get an order of magnitude twitchier.

Adam Serwer has a terrific article up in The Atlantic that explains that this isn't some sort of "conservative" bug. It's a feature:

"The conservative majority’s main vehicle for this imposition is a presentist historical analysis that takes whatever stances define right-wing cultural and political identity at a given moment and asserts them as essential aspects of American law since the Founding, and therefore obligatory. Conservatives have long attacked the left for supporting a “living constitutionalism,” which they say renders the law arbitrary and meaningless. But the current majority’s approach is itself a kind of undead constitutionalism—one in which the dictates of the Constitution retrospectively shift with whatever Fox News happens to be furious about. Legal outcomes preferred by today’s American right conveniently turn out to be what the Founding Fathers wanted all along."

 Which, of course, leads us to the past week's Dobbs v Jackson decision that overturned Roe v Wade.

Wingnut assurances to the contrary, people have been purging their spawn since there were people. The difference that Roe made was that the person outside the spawn was likely to survive. 

But, like the Bruen decision was not intended to make civil society safer, saner, more reasonable and more attractive for everyone but to give the Republican gun-humping faction a chubby, Dobbs isn't actually intended to make things more sane and sensible for actual human beings but to make the fundamentalist freaks that are one of the other important parts of the GOP base cum their brains out.

That's it.

That's all.

That's the entire reason these black-robed fuckers are tearing out everything built since 1929 they can lay their grabby little dickbeaters on.

Look up "nondelegation" if you really want to get a shiver of existential terror.

That's where these fucksticks are going. 1929? Just a pit stop on the way to 1879.

As I said back in May; these people are coming for us.

Any of us who aren't like them.

They're coming with force and fear.

Serwer sums it up neatly:

"The core conservative belief about the culture war is that there is a Real America that is conservative, and a usurper America that is liberal. This, not historical research, not legal analysis, is the prime means of constitutional interpretation for its current majority. (T)he right-wing justices’ vow that other constitutional rights are safe for precisely what it is worth—which is to say, absolutely nothing."

This is what they want for you:

It's from The Onion, but don't kid yourself.

It's only as funny as long as they haven't actually done it.

All these nice people? The church lady, the gruff-but-loveable old cuss down at the VFW, the nice missionary who handed you the tract the other day, the respectable attorney who's the chairman of the local Kiwanis?

They're your deadly fucking enemies and want you powerless and crushed.

So.

It's really simple:

Fight them.

Fight them or be destroyed.

So here's the problem...

...the imminent elevation of a wingnut fundie (what the hell do you call a religious/political "conservative", anyway? There needs to be some sort of one-word term for "religious nut/right-wing nut". Holy wingnut? I dunno, but Barrett is what one of those is...) to the Supreme Court reminds us that the current political problems facing this country are damn near insoluble.

Let this go - let the "conservatives" lock in a political mastery for the next fifty-odd years - and you have a numerical minority that clings fanatically to political, social, and economic ideals that range from disliked to violently loathed by the 55-60 percent of the nation that is not them forcing those ideals on that majority. 

Basically you have the political setup of any number of ex- European colonies; the colonial-favored minority rules the colonial-crushed mass of the population. As places like Nigeria and Cuba and Nicaragua and Rwanda and Congo and Indonesia discovered, that's not just not stable democracy, that's not stable, period. The ruling minority eventually has to go full-dictatorship to keep the mobs down. Or the mob rebels and it's civil war.

But...let's assume that the opposite happens. Trump loses bigly, the blue wave washes over the Senate, and suddenly the positions are reversed; the "liberals" hold all three branches, and are in no mood to act nice.

So Trumpkins left and right are prosecuted, wingnut lust-objects are attacked and destroyed, the Court is packed...all the wingnut nightmares bloom.

But the "conservatives" are still there. The hard, irreducible, intransigent lump of wingnut hate for the 20th Century remains scattered all across the nation. It can't be reasoned with. It can't be bargained with. It can't be appeased. It will prefer to burn the nation to the ground rather than accept the existence of Drag Queen Story Hour.

So instead of post-colonial Nigeria, we're stuck with Britain in 1859 Ireland or 1750 Scotland, or Austria-Hungary in 1914 Serbia ; a ruling majority has to deal with a violent minority utterly unwilling to live peaceably under their conquerors, with Ingraham and Limbaugh and Hannity as Radio Rwanda or the Black Hand, constantly urging resistance to the oppressors.

I have no fucking idea how either one of those works as nonviolent politics even in the medium term. Either one leads to shooting one way or the other, either as rebellion or dictatorship.

And I have not idea how to change that, or avoid it. I think it's just coming, and we're going to have to figure out where we all stand when it does.

Update 6/27: Interestingly enough, Bob Reich thinks we're already there.

The Fire Next Time, or, Jane Brown's Body

 For some time I've been wondering what the first shot of the coming "next Fort Sumpter" will be. The event that turns our Cold Second Civil War hot.

 Oh, wait. I didn't mention the whole "cold Civil War" thing? Damn. I am getting forgetful in my old age.

So you see, there is no "We the People" anymore.

C'mon. You know that. Just be willing to quit kidding yourself otherwise.

Instead there's a sort of vast inchoate mass of humans who call themselves "Americans" that takes in every damn one and every damn thing under the sky. All sorts of people, being and doing all sorts of things. Moderates, liberals, atheists, Quakers, whackos, undecideds, and the hopelessly lost.

And there's a hard, irreducible, intransigent knot of people who call themselves "Conservatives".

The latter - and they do have some internal divisions, too - don't see the former as "Americans" at all.

These "conservatives" have some ideology but are mostly defined by what and who they hate.

They hate "liberals", first and foremost.

But the different internal divisions hate different aspects of these "liberals".

The racists, who are primarily invested in being white and that being the default position of "American" hate the pushy darks and anyone who has the temerity to even slightly question that White Is Right.

The gunhumpers - many of whom are white, too - hate anyone who tries to pry them off their lust objects, all fifteen of them.

The religious nuts - many of whom are also white (but not all; this is where the largest fraction of not-white "conservatives" come into the GOP tent) - hate anyone who's not doing whatever their invisible sky daddy says they're "supposed" to do, or doing things that the transparent sky wizard says they're not "supposed" to do. So they hate mostly abortions and the women who have abortions, and anyone involved with abortions. But they also hate non-straight people who are doing any sort of non-straight things (like having other-that-hetero-sex) or ARE doing things that straight people are doing (like marrying and having kids and going to yard sales and shit) plus Muslims and Jews and...well, you get the idea.

There's also some people who don't "hate" so much as are either just regular old greedy bastards - these are mostly just your basic rich people doing what rich people have always done, which is simply whatever it takes to make themselves richer - or people who have drunk the Ayn Rand kool-ade and are stupid enough to actually believe that big corporations and big rich people will screw you (the average non-wealthy person) over slower than big government, so they're just fucking idiots.

Anyway...all the the things these people love - theocracy, plutocracy, weapons, racism - are largely anywhere from unpleasant to outright offensive to everyone else. So they can't really run ON those things. Turns out that if you tell non-"conservative" people what these various "conservative" people really want, about 98.7% of those non-"conservative" people haaaaate all that stuff. 

I mean, hate, like with the intensity of a million suns.

So the "conservatives" just usually lie, and instead talk about how if you don't vote for them the commie liberals will flouridate your water and make you gay marry a Muslim transsexual.

Seriously. That's it. Flogging tax cuts for the rich, and feeding red meat culture war shit to the base.

Other than that the GOP's got nothin' for the vast majority of the American people.

So for about the past 40 years the "conservatives" have been at war with the liberals and everyone else who isn't "conservative". It's been a cold war, mostly; until lately no actual shots have fired.

But then on Friday Ruth Bader Ginsberg died and so now here's what's gonna happen.

Trump will send the name of some reliable bag of Federalist Society wingnut hate (apparently smart money is on some Opus Dei lunatic named Amy Coney Barrett who is chock full of the sort of old-fashioned Inquisitorial spite and malice that appalls most cradle Catholics) before Ginsberg is cold.

Moscow Mitch McConnell will ram this internet-comment-section-level-troll through confirmation and she'll be sworn in before Election Day to help her pals like Thomas and Kavanaugh strongarm "conservative" talking points onto everyone in this country.

And then it'll be Game On. 

They'll come for the 20th Century.

You think I'm joking?

Abortion will be first, of course. Roe will be toast. There will still be abortions - because as long as there is sex there will be abortions, don't kid yourself, - but only safe for the rich. For the poor and the lower class they'll often as not kill the women along with their spawn, which is the point.

Obergfell will be next, and, frankly, we'll be damn lucky if they don't overrule Griswold, Loving v. Virgina and Brown v. Board.

Lochner. Fuck. Lochner.

If you don't already, you need to Google Lockner v New York, because that's what the rich "conservatives" really want; a return to the Gilded Age, when plutocrats like John D. Rockefeller could say "The public be damned" and really do it. The six-vote "conservative" Supreme Court is gonna drive us back there most quick smart.

Along with any sort of workplace protection, you can kiss environmental and financial regulations bye-bye. Welcome back to the industrial world that used to set rivers on fire, and the highway to the Paleocene-Eocene Thermal Maximum by way of 1895.

The only happy news is that as we roam this dystopian thermal hellscape at least we'll all be heavily armed, because any and all sort of firearms regulation is going to be dead'er than a dodo.

So after Donnie and Mitch seat their wingnut it won't matter how many liberals or "centerists" get elected. Every piece of legislation they pass will be litigated to the Supremes, who will take their "conservative" axe to it.

And the only real answer to prevent this "conservative" Day of Jubilee?

Go full FDR. Elect a Democratic President and Democratic Senate and Democratic House, and...

Pack the Court.

And when that happens, the wingnuts will howl like rabid wolves, and the real red-meat nutbars, the Proud Boys and Nazis and wanna-be Freikorps will turn out with their rifles.

And there we'll be; waiting to see who fires the first cannon at the big brick fort in the harbor.

That's how I see it. I don't like that, but I also don't see any way around it. The Right is going to force the Everyone-Not-Right to bend the knee or they'll shoot.

And your and my and everyone else's choice is simply whether we're willing to bend the knee or shoot back.

I don't have to like that.

But I don't see any alternatives other than even worse ones; a corporatist "conservative" future where we all the "rest of us" end up as serfs in climate change Hell.

And, goddamn it, I'll go down fighting before I surrender to that.

Winter of my discontent

Sometimes it's hard even for me to remember, but I'm "old".

I'm over 60. I've left "late middle age" and entered the early stages of "elderly".

Mind you, I don't "feel old". I can see the age spots. I can see how my muscles have dwindled from the fullness of adulthood to that lean stringiness that seems to characterize age. I have all sort of aches, ohhellyes, and as of last week I'm bionic in both hips. Ugh. I'd forgotten how irking recovering from that surgery was.

But I don't feel like I've suddenly jumped two decades ahead from the sun-in-splendor of my forties. I don't feel ready to go down to the grave quite yet.

And yet, there it is. If I have twenty more good years I will be phenomenally lucky. I'm not dead yet, but my death - like a dragon on the roadside, to use Bill James' wonderful image - is increasingly visible. I won't make it into midcentury, and the bulk of my life is now part of history, and not future.

Not only am I now "old", I'm a very particular kind of old.

Born in 1957 I'm part of what I believe is called the "late Baby Boom" population cohort in U.S. society. I came of age - grew from late adolescence to early adulthood - between 1967 and 1977, so the way I look at the world around me is very much shaped by those years. Which were, as much as any period in American history, suffused with promise. The technologic and engineering promise that is perhaps best symbolized by the lunar landings of 1969. But also the social and political promise of the Civil Rights era, and the events of Vietnam and Watergate that led to what appeared at the time to be a great rejection of the ideas of an imperial America and a royal presidency.

It's fashionable now to mock the pretensions and naivete' of the Sixties and early Seventies counterculture. And, yes; that ideal and many of the people who embraced it were silly and naive and full of much of the poison that eventually killed the whole notion.

But for a time, and for me much of the time that I grew to a man's understanding of the world around me, my country seemed ready to live up to some of its noblest ideals. Freedom from want. Freedom of speech. Equal justice under law.

Yes. I know now those were largely illusion. I know now that even then they were flawed, and that many Americans hated them and fought them. But those were the times that made me. And that, perhaps as much or more than anything else, is what makes this time so bitter.

Because since 1980 I've watched my country reject those high ideals. In part simply because many of my "fellow citizens" would prefer immiseration to sharing prosperity and peace with "those people"; the dark, the queer, the poor. In part because many other of my fellow citizens would rather accept that the nation should fail "those people" rather than force a fight with the racists and oligarchs and theocrats. I've watched as malefactors of great wealth, people like like Rupert Murdoch, have worked diligently to turn my countrymen into aggrieved, angry, intolerant assholes. Worse; aggrieved, angry, intolerant assholes who insist that either the nation sway to their intolerance or that there be no nation at all.

Sure. I know that my country was founded by rich white guys and designed to be run by rich white guys for rich white guys. But it had seemed to me that this could and would be changed. That We the People would come to fully embrace the ideals of the documents we were taught to recite in school, y'know, "life, liberty...establish justice, ensure domestic tranquility..?" That stuff?

But that, instead, through my adult life, I've watched as the "conservative" people of my nation become meaner, smaller, more vicious, more angry and more vindictive and despite this obvious decline and fall take over more and more of the nation.

Despite being less than half of the country I've watched them steal two presidential elections and dominate the congress and the statehouses. Instead of arguing whether we should divest more of our empire sooner rather than later we now have a solid minority that insists on eternal war against phantasms like "radical Islamic terror" and "immigration". Instead of finding ways to reduce inequity and bring more Americans into comfortable prosperity we're fighting a rearguard action against legislation that shoves wealth upwards and further punishes the poor and disenfranchised. Instead of trying to decide which level of environmental health is healthy enough we watch as safeguards on poisons and pollutants are derided as "overregulation" and reduced or removed, as the people whose profits depend on the disregard of the public's health and welfare are placed in charge of "protecting" that health and welfare.

Instead of the promise of my youth, I find myself increasingly trying to defend the barest of minimums against the return of the predatory feudalism of the Gilded Age.If you wonder why I write so little here, it's because I have lost so much hope that anything I can say will do any good.

I don't intend to stop fighting these people. In the American Experiment to lose is to die, and though I'm old I'm not yet dead.

But it's brutally sickening to have to be fighting what I thought were battles won in my youth.

I never thought I'd see myself in twilight struggling over that same dark and bloody ground tens of years after the bright promise of my dawn seemed to sweep over it.

And yet, here I am, and here you are, too.

A cigarette and a cookie

Well.

The Malheur Moron Mulisha is finally all either in the sneezer, run away, or in one case biding safe in a ditch, food for worms.

The last of these heroes chieu-hoi'ed after asking for a coffin-nail and a cookie. From snacks to smokes, at least these jokers were true to their Constitutional cravings for cheap thrills and snack foods to the last.

The bonus round, however, goes to the original armed seditionist and welfare moocher Cliven Bundy, who flew the Friendly Skies right into federal custody. Seems you ain't the sharpest barb on the wire, Cliven, ol' shoe. You may have thought you were done with the feds but they sure as hell ain't done with you.

And that's goddamn good.

Because the Stupid, it's still out there. It continues to live, free and wild, even as these sad bastards will hopefully begin meeting their new Aryan Brotherhood friends for their long occupation of a very different sort of federal facility.

It even continues to arrive here, in eastern Oregon, even now - the latest import of this nonsense coming in from Nevada in the form of one Michele Fiore, elected representative of Clark County and wanna-be U.S. Congresswoman. Michele's quite the piece of work, and here she is on the subject of our latest outbreak of armed sedition:

"Fiore promised that the cause for which they fought – defending citizen rights under the Constitution – would go on even if they were arrested."

Citizen rights, my sweet rosy-red ass.

If these damn traitors were "defending" anything other than their own goddamn greed and stupidity then I am the goddamn Dragon King of Bhutan.

This, this is the exact sort of thing that should be throttled in the throat of any seditious liar that utters it. This is the sort of thing the sows these Cadmus traitors, a sort of Cheeto-shaped mental eyetooth that awakens their hunger for power (and snacks, and maybe a Marlboro, but, hey..."defending citizen rights under the Constitution" can't be done on C-rations.

Wait. What?)

For all their irritating rhetoric and seditious treason these morons are just the cannon fodder. The meat waiting for a bullet so it can be finally put to a useful purpose to fill in the fosse. Only the (rather low-hanging) fruit of the poison tree.

Fiore. Fiore is the fucking tree.

It is her beliefs - the guns trump ballots, that traitors are "patriots", that the commons are for the taking of anyone armed enough and selfish enough and greedy enough to take it - and her spouting those beliefs, and the public post she has been given to spout those damn deadly treasonous beliefs that is the root and branch that bears this bitter (albeit perhaps smoky and Oreo-tasting) fruit of treason.

And government of the people, by the people, for the people, shall perish from the earth if We the People do not take the axe to her, to people like her, and cut them down at the ground, dynamite the fucking stumps, and salt the earth to ensure that no more like them will spring from it no matter how many American Spirits and Doritos and .45ACP rounds seditious bastards like Bundy and Finicum and, yes, like Fiore sow there.

Tortured logic

Y'know what may be the saddest part of the whole "I guess we DO torture..." business?

The degree to which being opposed to torturing helpless prisoners is being cast as a "liberal" issue.

Fuck that.

Torture is among the lowest, vilest, most despicable of crimes. There is no excuse for it other than fear and desperation. As I said earlier; I would harm a captive if I believed that it would save people who depended on me. But then - I would I hope, if I was man enough - I would accept my own guilt and turn myself in with the evidence of my acts as the criminal I was and stand trial for my wrongs.

Torture IS wrong. The wrongest of wrongs. There shouldn't really be any argument over that; it's not a liberal wrong or a conservative wrong, it's a human wrong.

Period.

But somehow this is all getting twisted around into a "liberal" versus "conservative" issue. The peripatetic "conservative" commentor "no one" - who has made his appearance here before as well as over at the MilPub and Jim and Lisa's joint - just described my disgust and horror that my country is now unquestionably in the same class as Imperial Japan and Soviet Russia and Nazi Germany as industrial states that torture their captives as a "liberal rant" (it's over at the 'Pub, but you get the picture).

And, y'know what? That just saddens and sickens me even more.

Because I grew up in a "conservative" house. My father the Master Chief was a rock-ribbed Republican up until the Eighties when he grew sick of Reagan's "government is the problem" bullshit. Many of the most decent, honorable people I know are or were "conservative".

But by that very definition the notion that the nation they love, that I love, could act like the Kempeitai or the NKVD is sickening and saddening to them as it is to me.

I'm sorry, but if you think that wanting to coldcock Dick Cheney for being a cowardly sonofabitch who ran like a frightened sissy when his country called on him to fight but loves the idea of having one of his lackeys torture some A-rab is a "liberal rant" rather than just being justifiably insanely outraged at the craven fucker's utter gall you are completely fucked up like a football bat.

Under the mossy rock...

I usually read Ross Douthat and just smirk.

I mean, the guy is a sort of poster-child for "entitled and clueless". His positions on pretty much every issue can be limned by just looking at any sort of potential subject of political, economic, or social dispute and thinking "Now...what would I think about this if I were a clueless douchebag who never had to face a moment's fear or a minute's want in my entire pampered, deferred-to life..?" and you'd have it nailed.

So I can't pretend I was eager to read his latest editorial about why the Teatards shut down the federal government. I figured I'd pretty much sussed out what he had to say. But I had some idle hands and those are, as you know, the devil's playgrounds. So I clicked the link and off I went.

And I found that he DID have something I needed to read, but not, I'm sure, for the reasons he wrote it. Here it is, in his own words:

"Conservative politicians take power imagining that this time, this time, they will finally tame the New Deal-Great Society Leviathan...and then they make proposals and advance ideas for doing so, the weight of public opinion tilts against them, and they end up either backpedalling, getting defeated at the polls, or both."

At which point I have to admit, I didn't smirk.

I laughed out loud.

In a nation with perhaps the industrialized world's least-comprehensive "social safety net", where a single major illness or screw-up or a couple of cases of hard luck can put you out in the street, where, for example, were I to lose my job through no fault of my own it is entirely possible that I and my entire family will drop into poverty because no one will hire a 56-year-old geologist with a family and a bum hip in one of the shittiest development economies in fifty years...that when you "make proposals and advance ideas" that will make the lives of people like me less secure, more precarious, more likely to end up in poverty in our old age...our opinion "tilts against you".

Can you imagine that?

But there you have it. The inside of the heads of the people who, like Ross Douthat, think of themselves as "small-government conservatives" who..."see as forty years of failure, in which first Reagan and then Gingrich and now the Tea Party wave have all failed to deliver on the promise of an actual right-wing answer to the big left-wing victories of the 1930s and 1960s — and now, with Obamacare, of Obama’s first two years as well."

You note the crucial qualifier here.

The Thirties and the Sixties.

Not the Forties, when Big Government went from a standing Army of 100,000 to one of 8 million. Not the Oughts and Teens when the CIA became part of a Directorate of National Intelligence and the NSA became all of our internet service provider. Not the Fifties, when Ike warned us about the "Military-Industrial Complex" (he left out "Congressional" but, hey, the man had to think of his Party...)

Nope. "Big Government" isn't the National Security Agency. It's not the Department of Homeland Security. It's not the Department of Defense, or the hungry corporate remoras that live off the federal dollar from those organizations; Raytheon, General Dynamics, Electric Boat Company, FLIR Systems, Boeing.

It's poor people.

It's sick people.

It's old people.

It's the "Great Society".

THAT's the evil "Big Government".

THAT's who Ross and his "small government conservatives" want to take out behind the barn and put two into the skull.

THAT's why we are where we are.

Because the people that Ross Douthat talks to, the people who are talking to the numbskulls in Congress, the numbskulls themselves, want to "shrink" government...not by getting rid of all those expensive warships, or by not bombing unpaved parts of the world where someone might be eating some Osama bin Ladin kulfa balls, or by cutting back on agribusiness subsidies, or tax giveaways to Kim Kardashian...but by making sure that I can't get insurance for my pre-existing condition or a pension when I'm too old and sick to work and my broker has looted my 401K.

Honestly.

"And if this attitude sounds more like a foolish romanticism than a prudent, responsible, grounded-in-reality conservatism..." concludes Douthat.

Well, no. Actually. This attitude sounds like the meeching whines of a bunch of sour douchebags terrified that somewhere, somehow, someone they don't like is doing okay because of some tax dollars that they think should be going to the Walton family to buy yet another vacation home.

I'm still waiting for some "prudent, reasonable, grounded-in-reality" conservative to show up with a plan that isn't based on hippie-punching and sour grapes that their side fucked up in 1929.

And if our boy Ross is any example I don't expect that to happen anytime soon.

These fucking people...

Undead Wrongs

I can't really add anything to the political post-mortem of the late Margaret Thatcher that Pierce and Lemeiux haven't already laid out in detail. She really was no more than Churchill without his gift for rhetoric

(and I should comment here that Churchill the politician tends to get subsumed within Churchill the Battle or Britain, but get him away from his old enemy Adolf and the man turns out to be a rather mean, narrow-minded, intolerant, harrumphing fusty old imperialist. His refusal to accept that white Britons weren't designated by God to rule the "lesser Breeds without the law" doomed the Empire to a decade of nasty anticolonial wars and rebellions. Thatcher's Irish and South African policies were as bad as anything Winston imagined without the redeeming defiance of a looming fascist empire.)

and I was never able to summon much more than contempt for her whilst alive. I have no more affection for her now that she is food for worms.

But I will give her this; she managed, along with her counterparts in this country, to turn the tide of social and political opinion that had been running strongly against "her sort" since the trainwreck of the Great Depression. She liberated the malefactors of Great Wealth from the social and political exile and made it acceptable to be a greedy, selfish, irresponsible bastard. She revived the notion of the Unworthy Poor, that same vile screed that excused the brutality of Victorian capitalism and fired the rebellions of communism and anarchism. She made it acceptable to not care about anything but your own greed for gain and that has not changed, and that may well be her greatest victory, the guerdon she carries down to her grave.

And that is at the same time her darkest evil.

For if the industrial democracies are to mean anything more than scraps of colored cloth flying over splotches of land and sea, more than just empty words in lawbooks and histories, they are and should represent the greatest hope for a decent life for the most people. They must stand for those freedoms that FDR talked about; freedom from want, freedom from fear, freedom of speech, and freedom of - and from - worship and those freedoms must extend to every citizen from the wealthiest and proudest to the poorest and humblest.

The freedoms cannot be simply the privilege of the wealthy and the well-born. And they cannot be mere words that can be set aside by "the free market"; the breaker boys and match girls, the poor broken on the wheel of labor and cast aside to die destitute are and should be a shame and a hissing to any society that calls itself a "republic" or a "democracy".

The deepest evil of Thatcherism is that it comforted the comfortable and reassured the wealthy and powerful that the hardships their actions visited on their fellow citizens were not sins and shames but merely happenstances.

And though it were in another country, and besides, the wench is dead the evil that she did lives after her. Because of that I cannot but hope that there is indeed a Hell.

And that when I arrive there I will find Baroness Thatcher chained, far below me in its direst pit, so that even in my own torment I may still savor the sweet sound of justice; her screams of unbearable agony.

Half Beck and Half Maddow

Interesting article in the Economist here.Reading it gave me an uncomfortable twinge.

Because I'm one of those insular people he describes.

The last real prolonged contact I had with real red-meat conservatives was when I was in the service. And I should note that there I generally tended to keep my mouth shut unless something really unpassable came up.

The last really conservative friend I had was an engineer I worked with, and he and I haven't spoken since he took me out for a drink with his two fellow Red State pals and we spent most of the night arguing politics.

I know I've often observed about what I consider the dysfunction of my country in this place. And reading the article, I find the author's observations uncomfortably similar to those I've made and noting that his conclusion - that the "big sort" is making the United States ungovernable - is exactly what I've been fearing. But, also, realizing that his main thesis, that "...America is splitting into “balkanised communities whose inhabitants find other Americans to be culturally incomprehensible.” indicts me along with the rest of the country.

Portland is often protrayed as a blue city in a relatively blue state. But we're not, really. We're a VERY blue city, those of us clustered around the confluence of the Columbia and the Willamette. You get out to places like Oregon City and Scappoose, though, and you're in magenta country; mostly red with a tiny hint of purple. By the time you get as far as Corbett to the east, Canby to the south, or North Plains to the west, you're as Red as the Soviet banner. The entire eastern half of the state is as conservative as can be; nary a Democrat has been elected there since the repeal of the Sunset Laws back in the Sixties.And I'm as bad or worse than anything described in the article. I actively avoid Fox News, knowing that hearing the conservative take on events will produce a skeptical sneer in minutes and reduce me to incoherant rage after a quarter of an hour. I used to read conservative magazines such as American Spectator or National Review; now, I can't tolerate their worldviews enough to examine them for some traces of appeal. When I hear Beck, or Coulter, or Hannity, or Palin, entsichere ich meinen Browning.

If I'm any evidence - and I'm a well-educated white man, the very embodiment of the sort of person my society gives power to and trusts to rule - we're not even trying anymore.

The Economist review comes to the complacent conclusion that;

"Mr Bishop goes too far, however, when he says the “big sort” is “tearing [America] apart”. American politics may be polarised, but at least no one is coming to blows over it. “We respect each other's views,” says Mrs Wortendyke of the few liberals in the home-schooling movement. “We hate each other cordially,” says the liberal Mr Balis."

But I fear that that complacency is outdated. I find little remaining cordiality for conservative goals amid my neighbors and friends, while everything I hear and read, when I do stray into Fox News World, suggests that those who disagree with me and my friends do so violently.

Lincoln once said that a house divded against itself could not stand; that the nation could not exist half-slave and half-free. I wonder; can a nation half-Beck and half-Maddow long endure?But to preserve that house Lincoln had to fight a civil war. The half that was slave had to be beaten down. I have growing doubts that the Beck and Maddow nations can find any commonality. But I dread the possibility that the divide must be, not bridged, but conquered.

What can we going to do - can we do anything - about this? Or are we doomed, like the France of 1940, to tear ourselves apart until some foreign enemy enter to mercifully end our squabbling?