Safe

Christmas Day and I'm doing a little cleaning. Some construction, dilatory of course, is going on and one must keep down the dust.  Got another new wetvac, the last one was faulty, and it's a pleasure to see the floor get actually wet and then sucked.  That's what she said.  Gotta expect contractors to go slow over these holiday days, but I get a tad fretful.

Went to church, a church, for the first time in, oh, 12 years.  Is a "christening" the same as a baptism?  It's the first of that nature I've been to.  And I was at my own baptism, twice.  Lutherans  (took me about 8 tries to spell that right) do infant baptism, and of course an old-time Scandinavian like me was raised Lutheran.  Christmas Eve was present-opening time.  Objectively, that does make more sense.  Now I don't even bother.  (Just texted my son.)  Second time as an adult, over twenty years ago now.  I've been wayward.  The sect I identified with, and still do, if I were to, did adult baptism -- it is after all a conscious decision -- and infant dedication.  In either case, of infant "baptism" or dedication, it has to be about the adults.  I took my own son down to the dam and "baptized" him, because even then I had a sense of what it was about.

A Methodist ceremony, this Sunday.  Not as liturgical as Lutheran, but very, uh, methodical.  There was a call and response prayer, that I read but could not speak outloud.  It was a promise to do things, be holy, be Christian, in a way that I with my dark heart could not commit to.  Made me very sad, to face how far I've wandered.

Held a baby for the first time in decades. The pastor, a Korean woman, while she was officiating held up the baby but did not support the head.  Not a mother, I'm guessing.  I was chanting to myself, hold the head hold the head, and some matron in the congregation actually called it out.  Later I got buttonholed by a too-friendly fella who wanted to talk about history and global warming.    Well, at least it's something to do -- I'm not good just standing around with strangers.  The pastor's sermon did not have one word of actual Bible teaching.  If they don't preach the Bible, they're just making a speech.

So.  There are people you like, people you love, someone to call when you need help, someone to ask advice of, confide in.  What is the world, life, but memory and phenomena, experience and interpretation.  Life is crowded not with objects but with relationships, large or small, many or few, but filled.

The most recent media monster set a fire then murdered the responders and killed himself. Bang bang. Years ago he'd hammered his grandmother to death, yesterday he killed his sister.  Left a note that talked about burning down the neighborhood the way he liked to do, something like that.  He saw himself as elemental, a force to be reckoned with.  Fearsome, powerful.  Unstoppable will.  Not at all pathetic or contemptible.

Whether it's Beslan, with hundreds of young children blown to bits by terrorists, or a lone gunman in a kindergarten classroom -- an atrocity precisely one order of magnitude less horrific, statistically -- well, life is not safe.  Some people don't want to be hurt, and it controls them.  Some people want to hurt others.  You think this is a too-obvious observation?  It is the secret of existence.

The great lesson and error of my life is about how painful love can be.  The error is that I'm afraid, now, to love.  Ho hum.  It's going to be a very long day tomorrow, and I'm not going to be able to sleep.


J

Presto

I don’t like it when people hostile to me are right. My wife, my father. She was going to a psychologist, a therapist, oh, 20 years ago, when we were still technically married. I think it was Carl Faber, well-known, a mythology guy -- used to hear him on KPFK, the gay communist Pacifica station -- quite eloquent and passionate, died sometime in the mid-nineties -- just looked it up … thought he’d killed himself, but it was cancer. Using the evidence of my wife’s testimony, he concluded that I, her estranged and unloved husband, “wanted to be taken care of.” So she triumphantly informed me, as a trump in her on-going suit against me and my failure as a man and husband.  I was scandalized at the breach of professional ethics, to diagnose the husband of a client based solely on one-sided evidence. He must have uncritically swallowed her side of the story. Seems naive.

 I would never have admitted it to her, but he was right. I did want to be taken care of. What she didn’t ever see, and so could not have communicated in her rants and complains about me, and men, was that I also wanted to take care of her. I wanted us to take care of each other. Seems like what a marriage is supposed to be. I wasn’t good at it, broken vessel that I was, but I find myself right now needing to believe that people who get to know me see that I am highly motivated to help -- a weak word, but it will have to do. It wasn’t any different then. I wanted her to be happy, and tried in my frankly clumsy way.

These past few days I’ve been mulling over a memory, about how, in the early days of my marriage, in Australia, we visited some friends of hers who’d just had a baby. I saw the baby and laughed, and said in my loud gauche American voice that it looked like Uncle Fester. Now, 25 years and more later, I am astounded at what a fool I have been. How the parents refrained from slapping my face I don’t know. How they must have hated me. And I simply, blithely, didn’t get it. Had I been slapped, I would have been outraged. You see how unprepared I was for the adult world.

Aside from the usual, I married her, largely, because we both believed she had healing powers. I was sort of New Age in those days. She had no healing powers, which fact must have fed her hostility towards me. Turns out I was more insightful than she was, for all my profound blindness. But intuition and lack of trust may in this case have been the same thing.

 Some other time, between these two events, in the early nineties, when I was trying again to have a relationship with my father, he, out of the blue, for no discernible reason, told me in a tone that brooked no disagreement that I did not like myself very much. This was just another criticism from him, disguised, and I had the wherewithal, no longer being a vulnerable child, to respond that, no, it wasn’t that I didn’t like myself, it was that he didn’t like me. “Oh, no, I like you.” “Right, so you, who don’t know me very well, you like me -- but I, who know myself really well, dislike myself.”

 Problem is, he was right. I didn’t like myself very much. Still don’t. The other problem is that he didn’t like me either. I mean, some other occasion, occasions, he told me in those very words. Thrice, as I vividly recall. “I have to love you, because you’re my son, but I don’t. Have. To like you.” Once when I was a teenager, again in my twenties, and then in my thirties. I’d forget it if I could. Like I’d forget the Uncle Fester thing. But such memories burn. One of the things I don’t like about myself.

 We are what we are made to be. I was raised to dislike myself. Something about no-win situations, about constant criticism and hypocrisy. Double-binds can make you crazy. I’m only neurotic, and someone else’s craziness made me pretty good at resolving contradictions. Free will and election aren’t all that hard for me. I’m good with meta-solutions. I understand terrorism, fanaticism, mass murder. I understand evil, as much as is possible without submerging oneself in it. It’s just a matter of thinking you’re right. That’s milk to me, wrong people who think they’re right.

 So tonight someone I’ve known for some years offered to fix my back -- just a few quick pushes between the shoulder blades. Well, I’d have to be crazy to pass up a chance like that. And indeed, a few things popped into place -- not vertebrae, but some sort of muscular stuff. Not fixed, but it is significantly better, enough to lighten my mood. Couldn’t expect anyone to start digging in on what I euphemistically call the hip thing -- it’s really deep in my right glute. It’s so bad it spasms if I sneeze. Last month I needed a cane … didn’t get one, but I needed one. It’s not touching I mind, it's vulnerability, which is another word for intimacy, also known as trust. See? It all ties together! Specifically in the fact that I have the phone number of a recommended chiropractor, but, in love as I am with my pain, I may delay indefinitely setting up an appointment.

 I want to be taken care of. But I don’t like myself very much. One of those paradoxes I’m so good at accommodating.

 I hope you appreciate how skillfully I pulled all that together. For something free you found on the internet, you’re really getting something special. So sad that you don’t like me more.

 This latest school murder-spree atrocity, I said my piece on it. Here’s something to ponder -- call it a party game: which is more evil, what happened Friday, 20 little ones killed all at once, or this same killer, killing 20 little children, only just one, every six months or so over a ten year span? And then he kills himself. Sudden magnitude and national grief on the one hand, isolated family doubt and loss on the other. Posing it thus, it’s just another clueless and insensitive blurt from me. I don’t mean to be glib. My point is, how is this current spree less evil than serial killing? He was crazy only briefly, albeit monstrously. Had his life been longer and the number of his murders the same but wiped over more of the calendar, would the pundits be calling him “troubled”?

 Please note that I was exactly right about him -- living in a basement playing death video games. No word yet on the pornography. Do not let people who are highly interested in actual guns spend all their time alone with kill games. Not good parenting. Good parenting is patient, clear, firm, consistent, supportive, affectionate. I admired my son, and didn’t keep it a secret. I took joy in him. He valued my approval so much, that he earned it. I like myself as a father very much indeed.


J

Web

The best and most fantastic thing about Obama's reelection is that now I can be so very much more agreeable.  In the old, BO days, Before Obama, when the Lefties were unceasingly asserting how bad America and Americans were, selfish and greedy and fat and stupid, I would hasten to correct them, saying they meant humans, not Americans.  I will no longer be asserting that point.  Now Americans have clarified and affirmed their stupidity and laziness and stupidness and greed and stupidosity and incompetence and stupiditude.

Every now and again I find myself saying, outloud, whether I'm alone or in public, in an exaggerated hayseed backwoods voice, Mahyjuk buhynz?!  Were kin Ah git me sum uv theym mahyjuk buhynz!?!   We've just traded all our pigs for some of them magic beans -- I mean, they're magic!  So I can agree with the Lefties.  It's not even a compromise.  I'm on their side.  I've been converted.  Americans are the stupidest.  America is the stupidest.

Aside from the macro destruction, slow but inexorable like the progression of ice age glaciation, we have the localized insanity, today, of a massacre at a Connecticut elementary school.  There simply are no words for it.  An entire classroom of kindergarten children murdered.  The killer first murdered his father -- perhaps, speculatively, I won't bother to corroborate this -- in New Jersey, then transported himself to his mother's hometown and murdered her in her home, then went to the school where she taught and murdered her little students.

The murderer was dressed all in black.  Some official, or a talking head, or talking mouth on the radio, characterized the killer as "troubled."  He didn't seem to have much trouble.  Euphemisms.  Well, as I said, words cannot suffice.  No word or words will do.  Scum, garbage, monster ... "shooter", etc.  Meaningless in their inadequacy.  There is no consolation, no justice, no explanation or understanding.  There is only the inevitability of Hell -- the purpose for which God made it.  Had the killer not killed himself, the only appropriate response would be summary execution, first armed man on the scene puts a bullet into his head, no goodbyes, no speeches.  Mad dogs need to be put down.  Isn't it a shame that there are mad dogs.  Tsk tsk.  But kill them.

Dressed all in black.  He wanted to be scary, see.  All those tens of thousands of hours he had spent playing video games, kill games -- the concrete fantasy he had constructed in his mind, the sexual emotion power terror of it all.  Kewl.

The Lefties, who have been proven right by the recent Revolution, will of course be right in their triumphant calls for gun control.  I think this will do it, actually.  The next big thing.  Save the children -- not repeal but ignore the Second Amendment -- just a scrap of paper.  First Term, ObamaCare; Second Term, SaveTheChildren.  It's obvious.  So my idea, of banning killgames -- it's a nonstarter.  Guns, not murderers, slaughter kindergarten classrooms.  It would be unconstitutional to ban killgames.  Free speech.  First Amendment.  The Constitution rules, and never mind any apparent inconsistencies contained within this paragraph.  You need to get your head right with Obama.  It's a New Age.

You notice I have not spoken of grief.  Did I not say there were no words? I have no emotion.  This is the way the world is.  It's the new normal.  I'm not being my usual sarcastic insensitive self when I say we can expect more of this.  We are the terrorist islamists now, who want to destroy our civilization.  We stupid stupid stupid worthless scum Americans, who see what is good and innocent and sweet and kind and generous, and are impelled to hate and destroy it.  I expected the onset of the Tribulation to be more obvious in its religious nature.  Turns out to be a lack of religion that set it a-going.  Islamism doesn't count -- it is on the outside, and cancer is what will get us.  The islamist can sit out this Jihad -- we'll do the job ourselves.

The killer is reported to have been developmentally challenged, Asperger's perhaps, an A student, Honors, with no interpersonal skills at all, always alone, didn't appear in the school yearbook, pencils in his pocket, walked with his hands straight at his sides.  Mother said to be very attentive.  Very clean house.  Highly involved with her kids.

So something like 20 little coffins, and a few adult-sized ones, will be the most recent monument to our culture, where regardless of reports to the contrary I believe adolescents are left alone in their rooms to drive themselves mad with videogames and web pornography, while not one single adult makes more than one single effort to intervene, intercede, rescue, pray for, this lost indifferent poisoned desperate and degenerate generation, whatever its trendy denomination, Gen Y, Gen Mill, Gen Nil.

That's all.


J

MH

A few minutes ago I picked up the voice mail, two actually, left hours apart but containing precisely the same information. Left this morning? I don’t know, there’s no time signature on the messages. The battery went dead, maybe yesterday, and I just plugged it in. My step father has been moved to hospice care. The decision has been made. In his next crisis, no meaningful measures to save his life will be taken. Meantime, his pain medications will be increased and attempts made to keep him comfortable.

It took a few minutes for sadness to overtake me. At first, and for a time, nothing, just acknowledging, absorbing, processing the information. I was asked to pray in the messages, and I wondered then, and afterwards, pray for what? That he become healthy? That he live forever? A miracle? I had no answer. Pray for what. And just now I figured it out, guessed, the right answer to the riddle. Pray for peace, peacefulness, acceptance. Prayer doesn’t change the external world. It changes minds. Apparently. 

Very softly, like the onset of trembling, I started to weep, slow, quiet, as a hesitation. Alone, but I covered my face. Not loud. Very soft. A dear man, that I have loved, and who I think loved me.

Incomprehensible.


 J

Neo-Con

There are such things as neo-Confederates. Lots of states rights, I imagine, which I'm all for, but no doubt a lot of Lincoln-hatred as well, and that’s a deal breaker. Lincoln is my favorite. I know someone who’s expressing an interest in Jefferson. Jefferson holds no great interest for me. A bright guy, very bright, talented, creative, curious and accomplished. Complicated. But just another second-tier intellect, and morally unimpressive. Not hero-material. Lincoln exhibited a breathtaking wisdom. So any contemporary movement no matter how sound in some of its precepts, that is too obtuse or biased to recognize greatness -- not my thing.

Otherwise I might now have started calling myself a neo-Confederate. Not in its Slave Power aspect. In its rebellion against, in the modern case, growing tyranny (rather than in the Civil War over-reaction to Lincoln’s election, and a loathsome love of individual tyranny, over slaves.) Was that a confusing sentence? The current Federal government is doing now what the old-time Confederates falsely accused Lincoln’s USA of doing. You don’t see it yet.

So while it will of course never happen, I am not  -- ill-thought-out though my idea is -- inclined now to argue strongly against the dissolution of the Current Union, into something more along confederated lines. A closely allied body of semi-dependent states, sharing a universal Constitution which oversees general rights, border security and national defense. In other words, what the current Constitution was designed to secure.

The Framers were shrewd men, not idealists. Franklin placidly concluded that every republic throughout history becomes a tyranny.  George Mason, per Madison’s notes said the government of the Constitution would start as “a moderate aristocracy” but it was at that time “impossible to foresee whether it will, in its operation, produce a monarchy, or a corrupt, tyrannical aristocracy. It will most probably vibrate for some years between the two, and then terminate in the one or the other.” I think we’ve been vibrating for just about long enough. Aristocracy isn’t an American word, but we sure do hear a lot of talk about the elite. These next few years will reveal whether or not we really do get an Imperial Presidency. Every Third World pathocracy calls its dictator a President -- maybe that’s what the word really means now. We shall see.

I was having a conversation, or a monologue, the other night, just a few words really, didn’t want to get all agitated and impose my rather narrow views on a tolerant confidant.  I made a few assertions about how stupid Americans were and how we needed more immigrants, hard-working, who come here to prosper and contribute -- you know, like how it used to be -- to save us from ourselves and our stupidity and decadence. You see why I’d be reluctant to go on like that, outloud I mean, rather than here, in the harmless pages of my little secret garden of nettles and weeds.

 The teens I used to teach who were fresh from Mexico were well-mannered and respectful; their classmates who had been here for a few years and had become Americanized were lazy smartass morons -- you know, American. We expect teenagers to be teenagers. We also expect them to engage in that normal level of pretense and hypocrisy, called good manners, that allows civilization to continue existing.

 Why does it bother me, our current trajectory? Politics is my spectator sport. Like football, which is not my spectator sport. But similar. Not the same, though, for a number of reasons. For all that there may be cheating, and corruption in sports, a payed-off player, a biased ref, the whole game is out there for everyone to see. In politics, often, the loser wins. The lesser man, the incompetent, the foolish, the delusional, the destructive. Can win. Hence the emotion and outrage, in this case, from me. It’s not just a game. The outcome sets the course, and there are real consequences, not only statistical in nature.

 The world has never been good, and America was not better in the past than it is now. The rich always buy influence, subvert politicians and process. Of course. The difference is not in human nature. It’s in the erosion of our institutions. The checks and balances of the Constitution are ignored and distorted, through the accretion of tradition, like Roman Catholicism or Rabbinal Judaism (sorry, if that’s your thing), at the expense of the meaning of the original document.

Nothing lives forever.

My hip thing is better tonight.  Took half an aspirin earlier, so maybe I'm living in a fool's paradise.  Well of course I am.  But the pain in my back is pretty bad.  Someone gripped my shoulder this evening and it just informed me how seriously I need some sort of chiropractic manipulation, or something.  I finally managed to get the number of someone who's recommended.  We shall see if I do anything about it.  I do seem to be in love with my pain.

It occurs to me every once in a while, not as often as you might suppose, that I am a very strange guy.  I was honed in on someone today, giving information about some particular topic of mutual interest, and when I do that I completely tune out the rest of the environment, almost a tunnel vision thing, my one dependable intimacy.  How sad.  I hope it doesn't seem rude.  I suppose I should think to make introductions, or include others in the conversation, but I don't think to do that.  Not good with names, hard to recognize faces, no small talk.  Before people enter the inner circle of my awareness -- where they become individuals, who matter -- they are pretty much objects to me.  Of course they matter, but I relate almost entirely on an informational basis.  I depend on the kindness of friends, their understanding and tolerance of how odd I am.  Otherwise I would have no friends.

Ah well.  Ah well.


J

How to Save America

Ira Glass, of This American Life, has a pitbull that bites strangers. Its needs are constantly evolving, as of specially prepared foods due to allergies, and it menaces him, and is dangerous and useless and for the past 7 years has taken up all of his and his wife’s free time. Rational thinking could only conclude that it should be put down. It has damaged the quality of his life, contributing nothing meaningful except the obvious. But he loves it. I should say, he “loves” it. I’m out of patience with parasites. At the very least he should have the dog’s teeth pulled. Cruel? See me after the dog, the PITBULL tears free of its leash and rips into a small child -- I mean “rips” literally.

 You have seen how disturbed I am. What to do what to do what to do. Somehow buy up the media outlets -- especially Spanish language? Wash out the brainwashing from Three’s Company and Married With Children? -- and that utterly perfect symbol for what America has become, reality tv? No amount of soap and hot water will ever suffice to wash such brains. It would take fire -- hopefully only, only the spiritual kind. Refining fire, my heart’s one desire; I want to be holy, set apart...

 Talk of Texas seceding. Nonsense of course. Did it once already, remember? I’ve heard it said that Texas has a special right to leave, because it had been an independent republic for a time, and voluntarily entered the Union, and therefore somehow retains the right to leave. I’d have to see the original document that ensured this right. Isn’t one. Anyway, the matter is settled.  So the Union is indissoluble. As a citizen of the once great state of California, now irredeemably ruined, I have to watch traitors and scum rape (is my diction immoderate?) the treasury and culture and middle class, wondering what will save us from the alien invasion when we’re already controlled by podpeople and demoniacs. I know, I’m mixing metaphors.  I have become unhinged.

Yes, I know, when you hear the word "culture", you reach for your speed-dial to the ACLU.  Bang.  I lose.

 How to save America? Constitutional Convention, Article V of the Constitution. So here’s the plan. I’ve been against the idea, because the quality of politician is not what it once was -- and once only, 225 years ago. But the way a Convention works, one of the options, is through the states, each state getting an equal vote. When there are 75% “red” states over “blue” states, 38, my brilliant scheme could work. Not a fresh start -- a reset, Amendments to make the rules even more clear -- like, the Constitution not being a living breathing document, but something set in stone, like the way it really is, needing amendments and conventions to change it, not the whim of judges and the arrogance of pols.

 Specifics? Please, not such inanities as an anti-flag burning amendment. Moronic. Not an anti-abortion amendment -- that’s already unconstitutional as a Federal issue: via the Declaration of Independence, under the “life” part of “life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness.” This is not a time for special issues. It’s a time for clarity. Something about fiscal responsibility, secure borders, separation of powers. Please, sir, these things are already clear, but idiots need to have facts kicked into their heads.

 Obama, all unbeknownst to the world if not to himself, is like that most disastrous former president -- not Buchanan, who fiddled while Rome burned (more aptly, who watched as kindling was gathered and flashpoints marked). Rather, Obama is a cross between Franklin Pierce (who like a Satanist conjured destruction, rehearsed the Union’s unraveling in the dryrun of Bleeding Kansas), and Jefferson Davis, the outright enemy. What else is it, to cede US sovereignty to the United Nations? You don’t see it yet. I fear that you will. Point is, we are already in revolutionary times. To arms! The Bluecoats are coming!

What were we to expect? The enemy won the Vietnam War, by which I mean the hippies, and that generation of vipers has been the ruling class for a generation.

 Ah well. You know me by now. I’m a fool, a foolish, foolish fool, and I’m just blathering here, with nothing important to say. Platitudes like save your money and tell the truth, be kind and obey just laws -- might as well leave cookies out for Santa.

 It’s just that something needs to be done, to save America. Seems like it’s worth saving, at least the idea of it. All the world rushes toward communalism, tribalism, socialism, dependence.  Let's pretend that we value the individual, and liberty, and self-reliance judiciously mixed with generosity -- you know, Americanism.  Sure it's just a fiction, but let's be idealists, and act as if it were possible.  It's not mythical, it's endangered.  Let's save it.  Liberals save crazy pitbulls. Save America.


 J

Neener Neener

We may not be living in the most corrupt time in American history, but this is a very corrupt time. I’m not referring to black-bag payoffs and stuffed white envelopes. I’m talking about a conspiracy of silence, about an institutionalized media bias that is tantamount to Jim Crow in its pervasiveness, its self-righteousness, and its repudiation of justice. Yes, it’s Leftist in this case, but that says nothing about the Right.

 The Right can be and no doubt has been and probably is as corrupt as the Left. Right and Left have no reference to integrity -- just to stated positions regardless of actual conduct. The Right values self-reliance, the Left values generosity … so the cliché goes. Who can argue with clichés? Both, either, are honorable only when firmly adhering to honesty.

That’s what fairness is. Honesty. It’s not equality of outcome, it’s not generosity, it's not everyone feeling good about themselves andor the world. Fairness is the disinterested application of pre-determined and presumably just rules.

 What is corrupt about our specific age is the indifference to lack of integrity. A tautology, sadly, and I apologize … lack of integrity is corruption. Words fail me, which is only slightly ironic, since I’m condemning the (Leftist-controlled) mass communications media. The fact that a big deal was made of Romney’s family vacation wherein a crated dog was transported on the car roof -- contrasted with the whitewashing not of Obama’s childhood meal of dog … but rather of his abandonment of his ambassador to Libya to a desolate and terror-filled death by smoke inhalation. On the one hand there is the incomprehensibly trivial tattle-tale hack reportage, gotcha, and on the other we have the perfect embodiment of the total failure of Obama’s Middle East policy with its much misheralded “Arab Spring” -- a term which must always henceforth be enclosed in sarcasm quotes.

 I get tired of being such an idealistic fool. It is unbecoming of a man of my years, middle of middle age, for all my material insecurity and lack of stodginess. But what a pleasure it would be, to find a liberal with integrity, fairminded, honest in evaluating his own side, sincere and clear-eyed in approaching the Right. I’m speaking theoretically, since I know of no such person. I just don’t follow it that closely -- I imagine there is such a creature, outside of the bestiary of mythology.

 How I would love to find common ground with such a person, and put aside important but circumstantially peripheral differences, that we might join to, oh, say -- in my little solitary evening musings here -- clean up local government, purge the go along to get along blight, the mutual backscratching for personal rather than public good. I have no big problem with cronyism, as long as the bidding process is honest and open. Two equal propositions, you go with the guy you know. Fair enough. That’s the way the world is. Honesty doesn’t mean you have to disfavor someone just because you know them. Grow up.

 Politics is by definition about compromise. That means there’s a built-in tilt against integrity. The key is to have a core, know your values, and within that context identify where compromise is possible. I’m all for manipulations, and pressure, and wheeling and dealing. Spice of life, and human nature. Saints can’t do politics. Shrewd is good. Cunning, crafty -- just be subtle about it, because in the tattle-tale schoolyard, trivialists excel most, of their many excellences, in hypocrisy. Paparazzi isn’t a term just for photographers -- or rather, scribberazzi will henceforth describe that group previously known as journalists.

 What we’re really addressing here is courage. It’s not easy to examine your beliefs and be open to correction. I may be having to do that myself. In these pages, most of what I write is not serious. I’m purging, I’m dramatizing, I’m just ranting, as one might do when one is alone. These are the shameful, dark and secret eructations of my disappointment and anxiety. No matter, I have a right to express myself thus, privately, as this is. I do have an antipathy to Obama, and I am distressed over the direction of America. Perhaps I overstate things, but I have a gift for invective, and it satisfies me to exercise it. This is said in the context of courage, because I have to examine the truth of my emotion, as well as the truth of my judgment.

 Perhaps Americanism is irrecoverable. Perhaps I’m just being emotional. What isn’t emotional, no matter the expression, is the observation that media, and thereby the electorate, is thoroughly corrupt.

I've decided that and/or shall hereafter be spelled andor.  So with scribberazzi that's two (2) new words I've given to humanity today.


J

Talk Radio

...is not enough. No serious -- by which is meant successful -- change, revolution, reaction, return to the Constitution can prevail until approximately half the organs of mass media are controlled by the Right. By mass media we mean of course propaganda. It is important to mean what we say, and say what we mean. Turns out that even more than character, words matter.

 We can give up on the fantasy that Americans are intelligent. They’re as stupid as any other nationality. The slow accelerating drive toward decadence slash socialism slash tyranny is not so much a choice -- if voting always brings a bad outcome, where is choice? -- cannot be stopped or slowed through application of business as usual. Witness the Tea Party -- good ideas, lots of fervor, inconsequential impact. Grass roots makes no difference when the soil is toxic.

 So it’s propaganda. After all, that’s what the Left has done, taken over all sources of information and entertainment. In our culture, what else is there? Football? I should have thought that wasn’t an entertainment, but an activity. The forces that have made sports a spectator activity are the same that voted in underwhelming but sufficient numbers to prop up Obama once more in front of his teleprompter. The incessant drone of opinion and assumption in which television submerges us has emasculated us, unmanned us, the way a bicycle seat through constant pressure and vibration can make a man sterile.

 Conservatives need to buy controlling interests in entertainment corporations. Need to fill decision-making positions. Conservatives need to be creative. Rather than accounting and engineering, building and repairing, and other productive and useful occupations, we need to sacrifice ourselves for a generation and engage in the frivolous, fundamentally meaningless pursuits of fiction, dramas and comedies, telenovelas, with an underlying message too subtle for censorship, of self-reliance and individual generosity, patriotism and self-sacrifice.

 I think we have abandoned God, and God has abandoned us. I think one and a half million abortions every year are enough of a human sacrifice that Satan is empowered and God is repenting himself that he ever established such a thing as America.

 I think that there is a clear and hideous chance that could recall America back to its senses, ie, another traumatic attack upon us from the middle of the East. By which the fecklessness and frivolity of the Obama Error will be laid bare, shivering and cold in the nakedness of the current Occupant’s incompetence. It will be a devastating price to pay, like a hail of meteors prior to a worldwide Flood. But if the warning is heeded, the Flood may yet tarry.

In the stark light of evaluation, all these years later, I have to conclude that Bush did more harm than good. My reasoning is thus: regardless of honorable, even correct intentions, if the job can be undone so disastrously, and decline can come so precipitously, then where was the leadership? Leaders have to plan past the next election cycle. Ideally, I mean -- the way we should take over the entertainment industry … a fantasy, a fiction, frivolous.

I’m thinking now that America was always just a dream, a fantasy. Jefferson is the exemplar. In his first term, he was that small-government low-taxes minimalist, against banks and industry and cities and armies. Second term, he bought Louisiana and tried to take over Florida. In other words, he became a Hamiltonian. If there were no rest of the world, if we are alone, with no alien and competing forces, then that first vision would be practicable. Notice my use of the subjunctive, the language of if. In the real world, only exploited colonies have no armies. Our compromise has to be in choosing our enemies. There will always be enemies.

But I'm rambling.  One rant at a time.


J

Crunch

I am beyond even the need for confession.  Beyond reason or rationality.  Consumed now utterly with destructive passion.  Obama.  Grounds for my obsessive antipathy are obvious and well-founded, but I need no excuse for the immoderation of my emotion.  I am deranged, as upon returning home to find my family murdered.  I know who the monster is, and mere justice as demanded by society with its probity is insufficient for my grief.  Hell is not soon enough.  As I say, I am deranged.

Evidence of O's incompetence is over-abundant and in every instance superfluous.  He is capable of nothing good.  If he is "responsible" for it -- by which I mean, if he does not blame someone else for it -- it will manifestly redound to the detriment of America.  Obama = Destructive Incompetent Arrogance is a tautology.

What brought all this on, you wonder?  Well, my dismayed and betrayed love for America, for one thing.  But more immediately, the picture, above.  What could I possibly have to say about the above picture?  Ignore the crimped, closed body language, all knotted up, sharp defensive angles, twisted, akimbo, skewed.  No, I ask rather that you observe the hand.

He's using that hand to support his intention.  He had three options, with such a gesture.  Palm up, chopping, or down.  Palm up says, I'm reasonable, I'm making a case, here it is, do you agree.  Sideways says, Here's a point, this is what I think, very clear, there is another side but this is mine.  The Obama gesture, his thing, diagnostic of his character such as it is, palm down, says, That's it, case closed, calm down, stifle all non-Obama opinions cuz I won. 

You think I've read too much into this?  (Obama gesture.)  Settle down.  Try to be rational.  I once worked for two summers in a law office, and I organized some street theater, and then I was in a state assembly.  So I'm the smartest and most qualified Pres ever.

Did I say I was going to stop saying you were stupid?  No can do.  Mental instability has undermined my character, and now I make promises I can't keep.  That's my excuse.  I'm not just lying, you know, like Obama.

I just can't get over how stupid you are.


J

Breathing

I’m thinking of taking morphine. Good idea? If it’s not one pain it’s another, and tonight another muscle in my back is tormenting me, actually spasming. Can’t hardly breathe. Have to hold my breath when I move. Haven’t had that in a while. Maybe I’d better start stretching? It’s been a bad few months, full of mysterious pains and drains. I’ve stopped bjj for a week or so, kept on activating that hip thing. I feel it wanting to be a problem, and I don’t quite know what sets it off, but I’m being careful. Had a for-no-reason muscle issue on the left of my back, now it’s on the right side -- I did 150 ring dips and 300 squats in 16 minutes and 2 seconds, maybe 3, but something amazingly awesome, like the way I am. Now for some reason a specific part of my right latissimus dorsi is spasming. So if you know any cheap drug dealers, let me know -- brother looking to score some pheen.

Fine talented young athlete is doing bjj now, comes from another sport and learns quickly. His father was watching tonight -- shaved head with a tight little ponytail, tats probably, big muscles. I suspect he’s an actor on some toughguy tv show. Big knotty arms, not much in the shoulders. Once you educate your eye, it’s a very odd and disquieting look. I just figured it out: it’s fine if you wear a t-shirt, but not if you wear a wife-beater. Short sleeves, no sleeves. Same thing with pro wrestlers -- big steroidal gym muscles, manly pecs and thick arms, and then these misdeveloped deltoids, all round and aggressive up front from all the benchpressing, and missing in the back. Gym bodies, entirely about appearance, pleasing or intimidating the uninformed eye.

I’m at an age now where I need therapeutic massage. Not sensual. Know anyone with reasonable rates? Need someone to wring the kinks out of me. I’m half calcium by now.

 Something else I wanted to talk about. Now what was it. Something about some huge sexual body part I have? That sounds right. Now what could it be. It had something to do with my thinking about if I were a woman I’d have really large breasts. I mean huge. Like, I cup my hands out in front of me, all the way at the ends of my arms, and that’s how big. Not even useful or attractive. Now what was it. My unit? No, that’s pretty normal, height-weight proportional. Scrote? -- nads? No. Libido? That’s under control, regardless of size. Well it’ll come to me. Nagging me though. Wish I could think of it, cuz it’s of general interest.  Deltoids? No. Glans? epididymis? vas deferens? Ah yes, now I remember. My pubic bone. Huge. Like a bull. Really fills out my chonies. Chicks dig that.

 Now you may suppose that sometimes my discourse becomes silly and unseemly. To this I would reply that every relationship is a compromise involving patience and sacrifice, and you enjoy the benefits while tolerating what you must. Along with the searing political insights and incisive historical analyses and devastating social commentary and rollicking satire you delight in and crave from these pages, you must endure my rampant narcissism and infantile obsession with my intimate body parts. You could start by being grateful that it doesn’t focus on my anus. Would you like me to drag you through that fervid swamp? I didn’t think so. At least a man’s primary genitalia are right out there in the clean and open air. At least mine are, at least when I’m at home. I’m a nudist.

 Every time I’m feeling ready to start some necessary project, I get some injury or find myself mysteriously depleted of vitality.

 The Obama Conjuration has traumatized me. It’s just a betrayal, by a voting majority and a plebiscite via silence, against Americanism. The word for Obama is mountebank. President Oakland -- there is no there there. We, by which I mean you, elected the Wizard of Oz – not the giant papermache head this time, rather the flapping curtain man, revealed, exposed, slight and stammering. It is the product of hope sustained by reality tv, a lottery mentality that imagines success always comes always through undeserved blessings.

 Universally observable human nature is no longer part of the calculus: as with the rest of nature -- say, climate -- saying so makes it so. Like, if communism could work at all, the Soviets, or the Red Chinese, or the Cubans, or the Khmer Rough would have made it work, and the whole world would now be enjoying the Age of the Workers’ Paradise … instead of enjoying a population periodically and cumulatively diminished by several hundreds of millions via Purges and Plans and Great Leaps and Killing Fields. Indeed, a man could fly by flapping his arms, if he could make his arms flap in just the right way.

 Lancelot has a wound, that will not heal, and it will kill him. So much for reality, and for myth.


J

* Why I Am Now Against the War(s)

YT

Because we don’t win them.

That’s where I’d stop if I wanted to be gnomic and glib. But it is a sort of important matter. We don’t win wars anymore because we don’t have the will. We don’t have the stomach. Like fools, like teenagers, we get all upset over something and go in to kick some ass. But it’s not about kicking ass, it’s about making changes that result in our benefit. War, as Bismarck said, or was it Clausewitz, is politics by other means. Clausewitz -- Bismarck said politics is the art of the possible. Politics is the opposite of dictatorship -- not the imposition of will, but the outworking of compromise. If we cobble all this into a syllogism, the conclusion is that war excludes compromise; corollary, that war is best prosecuted by a dictator. That’s it then: we don’t win our wars because we are a democracy. Odd, how television did that.

Something wrong there in the logic of course. Democracies can win wars. War here however does not mean damaging foreign infrastructure and killing enemies and displacing leaders. War here must mean increasing our own safety comfort welfare prosperity, whatever the cost to the enemy. We don’t do that anymore. We have confused, conflated, war with politics. Cuz you see we’re nice guys. Remember just now when I intimated that we were a democracy? More to the point, we are an incipient, hemi-empire, with the duties but not the privileges, and which fact is wholly incompatible with our American ethos of fairplay and generosity and liberty. We have lost our way. We should have propped up, were it possible, the British Empire, let them be the figurehead and world police. Not in the card or the stars, sadly, and our success is the poison pill of our downfall.

Don’t get married unless you’re going to be faithful. Don’t have kids unless you’re going to be responsible. Don’t start wars unless you’re going to win. Democratic America in living memory finishes long wars according to variants on one pattern only: airlifting personnel off an embassy rooftop.

Democracy and empire are, surely, incompatibilities. We need either a dictator -- I nominate Obama -- or we need to get our own house in order. Ah. I’ve just figured out the solution to the tribulation heading our way. We need to empire, no, Empire our way out of this mess. Since we have so clearly demonstrated a total inability to govern ourselves in a prudent manner, we need to more completely exploit the rest of the world. We have so far been not an empire, but a patron. Supporting the freedom of Europe for lo these many decades. Propping up dysfunctional Third World pathocracies (I just made up that word -- accent on the second syllable). Sixteen trillion is chump change, if we take it out of the mineral wealth of Africa and America South. It’s about time Mexico started to earn its keep. Europe is too arrogant and, frankly, warlike. But maybe Russia will get Europe. Asia has those Chinese, who will be the cathode to our anode -- we’ll squabble over Africa. Australia gets a pass, just cuz. It will be the new Land of the Free and Home of the Brave.

We will of course have to abandon our former American character. Oh, wait. Done. So now we need to enter truly into the next, misplaced, phase of the Roman pattern. Usually it’s empire first, then decline. We’re already decadent. Now let’s expand. I think this could buy us another hundred years.

Purely by coincidence -- or perhaps it was my subconscious at work, formulating the ideas that now scintillate before your dazzled eyes -- I was walking through Trader Joes today thinking how odd, the convention to wear pants. Left over from horse-riding days. Do we ride horses? Then I pictured myself striding the aisles garbed in a toga. Animal House echoes aside, I think there’s an argument to be made here. I’ll give it some thought and let you know what I decide.

So that’s why I’m against, now, the former and lost war in Iraq -- wherein my own son, blood of my blood, imperiled his life -- as well as the current and lost war in Afghanistan. I don’t mind the war. I hate the losing. I hate the comfort such lost wars give to the enemies of America, foreign and domestic. I hate the damage to the soul and psyche that lost wars do to those Americans who still remain. War is ugly and a failure of humanity. But humanity is ugly and a failure, and sometimes execution is just, even on a mass, albeit monstrous and impersonal, scale. The liberal wants a live free from hardship and failure, and opportunity and success. The conservative wants poverty and unhappiness, and wealth and inequality of outcome, as the result of freedom, logic, and unavoidable reality. What is unavoidable is inevitable. War.

Also tonight, 49 years out from the killing of JFK, I was thinking that America is always worse after the assassination of a president. We never get over it. Like Rome never got over the assassination of Julius Caesar. You may be drawing the unfounded inference that just as Caesar’s murder ushered in an imperial age of "Caesars", so an American empire might be brought about by, god forbid, such a death -- a dynasty of, god forbid, "Obamas" or "Bidens" or "Hillaries" -- and here I’ve been going on about how an American empire is next up. But you’d be missing the point I just affirmed, about what makes America, always, worse.

Hopefully the end of our Constitution will be brought about along the electoral, fascist model, of Hitler and Mussolini. Since the past several generations of Americans, at least, are incapable of learning from history, it must be hoped that this time a happier outcome may accrue, despite the lessons of the past. As Montaigne said, we know only what we know now -- we do not know what we have forgotten, and we do not know what we have not yet learned. And what we know now is demonstrated in the outcome of the most recent election. Study this paragraph deeply, for the key to wisdom herein may be found.

So, in conclusion, I’m against wars because under our current leadership we lose them, and I’m against assassination because America always becomes more leftist after them, and I’m expecting a literal or figurative tribulation, and in either case I’m expecting an Empire.


J

GV

I’ve been reading Gore Vidal's review of a memoir by John Updike. Gore -- may I call him Gore? -- marshals in full his heroic capacity for sarcasm as he proceeds to deconstruct Updike the man. I’d been waiting for Gore to die -- being the last of that coterie of mid-century luminous literati that danced so enthusiastically before a celebrity-adoring public. (You see, Young Reader, there was once a time (before reality tv, before talkshows had been utterly taken over by comedian hosts chatting solely to actors (mostly B-list starlets)) when actual conversation counted as entertainment.) Truman Capote, Norman Mailer, Gore Vidal, were the Kardashians and Huni Bubus of that lost age, only, possessing talent. Dead dead dead, now, all gone, but lamented only in the way that cellphones are enjoyed … because that’s how progress precedes.

 And I was wondering, reading Gore’s snide, unfair critique of Updike, how might the latter have responded. We cannot diminish it, dismiss it as an attempt at wit, because it is witty. For all that his stylishly framed tropes are oddly (not surprisingly, not distressingly) superficial, yet Vidal (‘Gore’ has become grating) was talented. But the word talent sets up a clangorous resonance with the parable of the talents. What is to be made of the man of talent, who wastes it? Not wasted in terms of productivity, for Gore Vidal, GV, was prolific.

I just don’t know if it is fair to judge a man for his unwisedom, as GV was, a deep, profoundly deep leftist. Maybe it’s an inherent trait in some people, the marrow of their souls, that no lesson of reality gentle or harsh can ever expunge. We judge a man first for his actions, then for his influence, and only
last for his delusions. Be that as it may, what we have here is a put-down artiste, never comfortable with the burly candor of the men’s locker room, save as a homosexual, but in full-throated glory in the epicene’s salon.

 And it was in reading Vidal’s essay on Nabokov’s Lolita that I decided never to read Lolita. The movie, parts of which I have seen, never engaged me. The book, reports suggest, is on a par with Naked Lunch, which long ago once found itself airborne between my hand and the wastepaper basket. Filth, trash -- not quite le mot juste. The nightly and years-long rape of a pubescent and later nubile girl as a morif just doesn’t grip me, for all the elegance of style or pathos of theme. Tsk tsk, ain’t it a shame, now let’s think about her clitoris some more.

Someone Wednesday had a big grin on his face 

because I was interacting with a lovely young woman. Seems I am suspected of heterosexual intentions. It’s almost a source of grief, and certainly one of unrest, how alienated I am from an adult expression, unleashing, of my libido. Who let the dogs out. This one was too young in any event -- not Lolita young, my son’s age -- and I do have a sense of decorum … unless I’m tempted, and that’s unlikely to happen when I’m in the capacity I was then occupying. But she was lovely, maybe a seven on a good day, and I’m quite charming, and I could not help but notice, and I’m good at ignoring, her smooth as cream breasts. Sort of noticeable. Which occasionally gets me to thinking what it must be like to be a woman, with such an obvious and inconvenient, um, badge of sexuality.

 I’m glad I’m not a woman. I simply wouldn’t know what to do with, um, my, uh, breasts. I mean, they’re just there, and you can’t hide them in shame, and it’s not polite or fair to flaunt them. But maybe it is. Not my problem though. Having a dick is difficult enough. And don’t get me started on balls. Always in the way, and I think my scrotum is getting baggier. I’m finding my underwear isn’t providing as much support as in the past. An elastic issue? I do hold on to them for a long time -- I'm referring to my underwear, and I want a pair that lifts and separates.  Somebody should market that idea.

 I know I’m wrong, but I consider it rude and unethical to impose my sexuality on someone I don’t know extremely well. As my first marriage informed me, it is an imposition. I wish I were normal. Cuz from what I’ve seen from the internet, I have an exceptionally nice penis and any woman would be lucky to enjoy it with me for a while. Maybe I should write a novel about that. Give me some feedback and we’ll take it from there. I’ve already got some potential titles: The Night and the Pillar, An American Cream, In Hot Blood ... it’s too easy. I’d do for middle aged horndogs what Nabokov did for incestuous pedophiles.

 Ho hum. Now you might suppose that the use of my own talent also is not entirely beyond a susceptibility to criticism. It may be you harbor the suspicion that I am not utilizing my gifts in a way fully consistent with my artistic and intellectual possibilities. To this I must agree, and add a lament as well for my untapped and seminal potential -- like deepsea drilling, like the Keystone Pipeline, like fracking. Why are liberals so against heterosexual missionary-position sex? But we are the way we are, until we’re some other way. It’s in the bones, which twist with disease, break with trauma, and grow with health until they harden.

 You’d think I’m too smart to be so unwise. But that’s what this whole post has been about. Meanwhile, don’t worry about me. If anything were a real problem, I wouldn’t talk about it.

This is what I did on Thanksgiving. Enjoy your family.


J

A Severed Artery

Here it is then. America has served its purpose. At the end of a productive career it is appropriate to retire.  How can we resent the fact.  As at the end of a long life, even those we most deeply love must pass, gently we pray, into death.  We grieve, but we rejoice the fine life lived.  So we must count it with America.  We will not think of it as degeneration.  The butterfly is changing into a caterpillar.  In a fallen creation, this must be the nature of things.

America rose and stepped onto the world stage for a purpose.  She preached liberty to all mankind, and brought wealth, and health, opportunity, actively and through her example.  She raised mankind to a new height.  In her blessings, she blessed.  We must be grateful for this, and humbled by it.  We have been the possessors and last guardians of something holy.  That we were too frail, too human, to cherish it enough to nurture it counts to our detriment, and we will be judged for it.

After judgment there may be mercy.  If we were not strong enough to protect it, not faithful enough to fight to the very extremity of our endurance to meet our duty, well there cannot be surprise in this.  If heroism were the norm it wouldn't need a name.  Think of it as the crimson cord of redemption, woven through the books of the Bible, passing even through our Constitution -- but regardless of what it might do, in reality it can't do everything that needs doing.  The universe is a balance between fulfillment and futility.  Hope can fail.  We will suffer for it, but we must console ourselves with the idea that our time is simply past, and now some other power must take our place.

It really was a beautiful dream, though.  I find myself grieving, literally grieving, for the lose of even the pretext of something so lovely.  Liberty, and that greatness of spirit that our system allowed -- the generosity and self-sacrifice, the heroism, nobility, the resolve to discern what is right and do that thing.  A wonder for the ages.  So rare.

We cannot lie to ourselves any longer.  Just another country now.  Some may have higher standards of living, some may have better education -- most anywhere may have something better. But we were America, and there was nothing better.  Can't say that any longer.  If we are governed like an occupied people, a broken people, regulated and taxed and allowed our limited allotment of bureaucrat-sanctioned "rights" -- how much soda we can buy, which words we're allowed to use -- this is certainly not freedom, not America as we have believed it to be.

This is not something worth fighting and dying for.  The only loyalty such a place elicits is that which is due to any homeland. It has never been a blessing to be French, or Mexican, or German -- these might love their country, but patriotism is just an intensified sort of fandom, like rooting for a sports team ... it's our team, so we cheer for it.  America was something different. Like Israel.  Not just a light but a star, to guide the world.

Ah well.  We wake from the delusion of Santa Claus.  There is only mom and dad, who work hard to care for their kids.  We had thought our mothers were virgins -- no longer.  Some of them are sluts.  We thought our fathers were heroes.  Some are poseurs.  But I misspeak.  We are that ignoble generation, and it is our children who will pay for it, at a cost disproportionately greater than the pleasure we demanded for ourselves.

I am unspeakably saddened.  It's not that the decline has not been clear.  But now it is undeniable, and I fear irreversible.  Sluts can become chaste, but they can never again be virgins.  We went whoring after a preening fool four years ago.  It turns out we like his sodomy, because we have confirmed our devotion to his perversions.

On the grand scale, it's just a passing from one era of history to the next.  To be expected.  On the personal scale, liberty matters, and we are witness to a sort of mass-extinction of rights.  Turns out man-caused Climate Change was real.  It's just that the climate was that of liberty, and the change was for diminishment.

How will I ever regain control over my own health care?  How will I ever be able to exclude the bureaucracy from my life?  They take a little, and a little more, and more still, until it is all theirs and they allow us to have a morsel, a crust from the lords to the lepers begging at the gate.

I just can't think about it any more.


J

Undoing America

This reelection is a catastrophe. Because the pages of FP have been the playground of excess, you might suppose I'm being satirical. No. It really couldn't be worse, the reelection of this incompetent fool. It is precicely as if Jimmy Carter -- do I capitalize his name? -- I've forgotten ... as if jimmy carter had been reelected. Instead of Reagan's correction, it would have been, uh, four more years of the rabbit. For more fears: OBAMA!

So we're in Alternate Historyland. I like science fiction. It's too much work to explicate thoroughly -- I'm not being paid, you know -- but suppose the USSR had not been stressed by Reagan's policies? An evil empire that did not fall. Now we have an empire in the making, during the Obama Error -- a Caliphate simply awaiting its own Obama, another The One, somehow, charismatic and inspired with some Genius, some Jinn of dark purpose. Understand, I like Islamic culture. Of all dark age systems, it is the least awful. Less mud. Let them have the civilization they want. But it is the nature of a Caliphate, as of a USSR, to expand.

Good ideas prevail, in the free marketplace of ideas. But where is there such a thing as a free marketplace. Do I even have that phrase right? Marketplace of free ideas? Idea-free marketplace? Entrenched powers manipulate markets, governments, to gain more power. In California, the worst state (because it should be the best), it is the unions and the super-majority Left -- I won't make a list of their perversions. In the US, there is no free marketplace of ideas, because that would require a free press, and academic freedom. Free means equal under just rules, which demands the balanced scales of justice, and there is no balance in the media -- a fair hearing of legitimate disagreement -- so there is no free press. Left press. As long as that is the case, the downward slide is unstoppable.

I have a waiver on Godwin's law, so I can with impunity cite the Third Reich. Goebbels was Reich Minister of Propaganda. That's right, an office of government that was all about propaganda. Goebbels was certainly the equal of Himmler and Goering in Hitlers affections, and it was Goebbles who bunkered down with Hitler at the end. Point is, propaganda. In America the gross mass of the gross mass media establishment is an arm of the Left. Not just a left arm, but the corpus. How can freedom prevail, where it has no voice? Liberty does not ring forth.

Likewise with the classroom. It is Left dominated. Youth is already unwise and ignorant. Is it a conspiracy, to keep them so and call it education? I won't expand on the idea. In any case, when the forces that shape and fill our minds are bigoted, this can hardly be called freedom. And a weak military in a fearsome world. And exorbitant energy costs, or unavailable energy as Sandy just demonstrated. And bureaucrats outnumbering productive people. And aliens invading, with impunity and contempt.

Enemies, without and within. This is what is technically called "decadence." Which brings me to my point. I think America is done. The debt will be dealt with via hyperinflation, which will destroy the middle class. Coercive government and public-sector unions (read, government) will undermine any reality of personal independence, leaving only the verbiage of freedom. Obama mouths platitudes about us being a free people, while he takes over the care of our health. Etc. Insanity.

Well, empires disintegrate. The road back to freedom requires less government power. How could such a thing ever happen. Consider the USSR, the British Empire, Yugoslavia, Iraq -- any unnatural welding of unlike parts. The idol with feet of iron mixed with clay. When these things are put together, we think they will stand forever. But they don't.

When we say we love America, what is it we mean? Lincoln loved the Union. Can there be an America without a Union? Yes or no, there cannot be freedom with this present Union on its present course. Is it unconstitutional for a state to secede? Law as it stands says, illegal. But the United States came to be through revolution, unlawful. Justified through natural law.

A people who would reelect Obama is unworthy of its blessings. Punishment is coming, a vicious thrashing by reality. I'm going to buy a generator, a futile act but I must do something. Revolution? Of course not. Science fiction stuff. But decay unto putrefaction. I catastrophize of course. So what if America just becomes Europe West. Some other power will rise to fill the void, and Europe, and Western Annex, like the rest of the world, will plod along. Since mankind has so rarely lived in freedom, its lose is to be expected. Freedom in any case is a relative term. Are we adolescents, to believe in ideals?

Even if there were a revolution, it would not be the revolutionaries who caused America's undoing. It was the Left, and a complacent, unworthy, corrupt American people. It is the nature of the prodigal to seek out the company of pigs. I have rambled here, but the issue is clear: what is it that we love, and how can we reclaim it. I do not owe loyalty to politicians or to government itself, but to the Constitution and the principles it embodies. The oppressed do not owe loyalty to the tyrant. The hostage does not owe loyalty to the terrorist. Somewhere in there is the correct analogy. Bottom line is, Americans must be independent. The alternative is not dependence, but slavery.

Big talk. It will come to nothing. It is the nature of decadence to be ineffective.


J

Tuesday

O was reelected again Tuesday.  Mandate and universal acclaim.  It's been that way for as long as most can remember.  People don't live as long as they used to though, mostly.  A couple of generations just fly by.  Anyway, the usual celebrations.  Selubrayshunz.  Every few years, no particular pattern, he calls for his reelection.  Always gives the same speech -- it's a liturgy by now.  The same misty gratitude from him, the same ecstasy from the acolytes.  Owkstusy from the Okuliytz.

The chip in our wrists votes automatically.  Some people started voting the day they were born.  Saves Karbun,  people not having to go anywhere or do anything.  As the national motto says, "Forward! Everything is always getting better."

His motorcade sped by the school a few weeks ago.  I didn't bother to go to the window.  I was alone, so no one could notice.  Afterwards I thought, what if there had been an earthquake, and a great crevasse had opened in the road and swallowed his limousine?  Then I thought, how could somebody make that happen?  Back when there used to be tv with commercials, there was a show about a little boy with godlike powers who did whatever he wanted to anyone he wanted.  I thought of that, thinking of the earthquake, what it would be like to have that kind of power.  Then I realized O already has it.  I'm one of the few, I think, who remember him promising to lower the seas.  Indeed he did.  Froze much of them over to do it.

Yesterday I went mad.  I read her name in the Rejuster and my heart has not beaten since.  I won't bother to describe it.  But, as I said, once, long ago, all bets are off.

I think I've come to a decision.  I have lived in fear and silence and cowardice and complicity and betrayal for, well, for these recent generations at least.  I may not ever have been the man I once thought I was.  That man, living in freedom, is no longer possible.  No gene splicing of atavistic traits will reclaim that humanity. Ubi non est dubium, libertas non est ibi.

A man cannot live, worried about losing his tyreless bicycle. He cannot live, clutching at a glove because it smells of a woman's hair.  He cannot live, denouncing acquaintances who are beaten to death as a result.  I have forgotten about God.  But no atheism promises a more meaningless end than life as it now is.

There used to be a Resistance.  All that remains of it is fantasy and the memory of old tv shows and the skulking pettiness that sneaks an extra spoonful of mash in the commissary line.  We have been so broken that they have grown careless.  Their violence has met for too long with only weeping, and blood other than their own.

We.  As if there were a we.  I will remind them of fear.  I will show them their own blood.  I will work such obscenity on their fresh corpses that all who see will glimpse a mirror of their own souls.  I will be as monstrous as Dumawkrucy, as evil as O.  I will burn down the world, and all its princes and their babes.  The wrong people have been suffering.

I

After the Blowdown

I awoke this morning disoriented and fatigued after a fitful, painful sleep. Something, something I needed to remember. Ah. Yesterday I was wrongly convicted of child abuse and assault. Yesterday I discovered my wife had given me syphilis. Yesterday I lost my job at the same time that I lost my reputation, my career and my assets. Yesterday one of my sons stabbed me in the back. Yesterday Obama was reelected.

America has left us. Now we must consider the nature of love. Are we to love America only when she is honorable and wise? What of when she is foolish and selfish and greedy and short-sighted and destructive? Shall we love her even when she is recalcitrant, irredeemable? -- when she like Israel goes whoring after other gods? And America herself? -- is she the land, topography, or a history, or a people, or a form of government?

There is of course no America. Only an idea and a continuity of identity, like a corporation. Like the ship of Odysseus, year after year wending the wine-dark seas, all the while worn-out parts replaced with new until no original piece remained. It is the same, yet not. So with America. She has changed, fallen frankly from a higher place, luxuriating in license while forgetting what liberty means. Human nature does not change, but nations do. What are we to do with this syphilitic whore?

Pray, and work, for her redemption.

Immigrants have been a great strength to this nation. Adventurous, courageous to leave their homelands and carve out a way in the American wilderness. God bless them -- they deserve our gratitude. But something has changed. In former decades our new fellow Americans came because this was the land of opportunity, and they wanted some of that, prospering and contributing. Now they are coming not for the opportunity but for the wealth. We are a rich country, and they want that wealth redistributed downward, their way. They flee their own corrupt homelands not to make something better, but to take from what hasn't yet been completely looted. In a social welfare state, to allow the unskilled immigrant unfettered entrance is to invite the Vandal, the Visigoth, who have no stake and feel no loyalty. Of course they come to work. But they harvest, and do not plant.

Very racist-sounding I am sure. But what does race have to do with it? It's about culture, and about human nature. Two of my three sisters-in-law are foreign-born and -raised. I want Third World immigration. How else would I ever find a mate? But, legal, please.  Rule of law radiating both ways -- that is our social compact.  Instead of the current conspiracy, government plantation overseers on the one hand, and underclass semi-dependents on the other.  Spurred on by the minstrel show of the media, oblivious to their own racism: after all, they are -- so sincere and secure -- entertaining us.

God has indeed handed us over to Satan. I mean it. But these things happen. There was, you see, no Great Repentance. Even Assyria had a Great Repentance, and it was an empire as wicked as the Aztecs'. There needed to have been a Day or Week or Month of Fasting, and I heard not one single solitary call for it, but maybe I wasn't listening, and in any case I myself never thought of it until too too late.

So now we have what we have, with his ability to appoint Supreme Court justices, hopefully not replacing any conservatives if they can hold on, but replacing with something even somehow worse Ginsburg and Breyer and the swinger Kennedy. And now we will have the privilege of the government being a third confidant in the doctor-patient relationship. If you can't trust an impartial bureaucrat... and what party is there that could possibly be more disinterested than the government? Or do I mean impersonal. And we will have a vitiated military, not paper but perhaps a cardboard tiger, just big enough to be not quite big enough. And all the anti-sovereignty UN "treaties" brewing in the works. And now we get to find out what ever shall be done with the enhanced "flexibility" Obama's mandate grants him re Vladimir.  And, of course, how could we forget, oil.

We have to love people. They are so weak and foolish. They are so unwise. For my part, I am, it appears, a generally unforgiving man, once I perceive the magnitude and deliberate nature of an offense. My justification is that repentance is such a rare thing. In this instance, Obama's reelection, I am just another victim. God judges humanity through its nations, and nations through their leaders. The USSR had no choice, nor most any of the desperate and despised Third World. For this, their down-trodden peoples deserve mercy. America chooses, and we are so corrupt that the very word, choice, is a rite and an abomination of Moloch.

Yes, I think you are very stupid, unspeakably so, and a whore. You are a drug addict abortionist gay-agenda anti-God traitor. You need to be driven naked through the streets spurred on with a whip. You need to hunch in broken glass, cradling the head of your dead child, wiping ashes from his face with your hair and your tears. But... you will. So you will need love, and forgiveness, and compassion.

First things first, though.


J

Election Day

Stupid.

J

The End of America

To be published on the event of Obama's reelection.

I must have been trapped inside the conservative talk radio echo chamber, believing sages steeped in a thorough knowledge of their own opinions.  I had been, you see, not unhopeful. But there is no hope now.  No political hope.  No social hope.  America, that stupid stupid bitch, has married her seducio-rapist, or rather affirmed herself a slut to the Leftist pimp.  May not be the Scarlet Whore of Babylon, but she's a whore.

There is no more America.  Weep for her, for she is dead.  Europe has leapt its shores and enveloped America into its night.  Another dark age, this one called enlightened, brought on by the flaccid barbarians of vice -- what after all is it, to abandon the precepts that built our civilization.

I had hoped that Sandy would be a divine intervention, but God is silent, or he has handed us over to Satan.  In any case, any corrective lesson that the Hand of God might have dealt has been misunderstood.  Obama, somehow, by sending out a photo of himself looking concerned in the Situation Room, and strolling with rolled-up cuffs on the edge of Jersey's new shores, has so impressed stupid stupid America with his manliness, that there is no orifice closed to him now.  Fuck me five ways, Obama, then Obamacare me into another gender and find a sixth.

So I am giving up on American exceptionalism.  We're just another country now, with no Dream except those of Obama's father, and no more claim to virtue than France or Uzbekistan or Cuba or Kenya.  Extreme?  If the only connection we have with being right is thinking we're right, that's what every country, just any country, can say of itself.  It is right for oligarchys or kleptocrats or islamist imams to press and impose their own advantage.  They think they're right.

We are past, now, in this final most self-revealing act of democracy, any claim of patriotism, which by definition requires sacrifice not advantage.  The only difference now between us and ancient Rome is that their bread and circus involved gladiatorial blood sport, and ours involves abortion.  Baby Googoo and Jersey Shorgies are surely a coarsening of our culture, but only in the way that vomit is  the eructation of an internal corruption.

My experience with God is that he lets you suffer.  Maybe he thinks it's good for us.  But if not us, then who will be a force for good in the world?  We must revise our understanding -- "US" in the context of doing good must refer only to the objective pronoun.  Countries do not do good.  Countries, the great arc of history demonstrates, must always become decadent.  Welcome to the 21st Century.


J

Spectacles

As is well known, among his many stellar attributes Your Humble Author is a revered antiquarian of early 20th century American popular culture. Before the country was taken over by teenagers.   I've touched lightly on the subject on previous occasions.  You of course will be utterly uninformed on the matter, mired in Generation Gack as you are.  Allow me to expose you to brilliance. Here, and here.  Lum and Abner.  Select parts of the above are laugh-out-loud ... no, excuse me, "LOL" funny.  You see, I lower myself to my audience, that I may raise them up.  The way you pat a puppy.

---------

And speaking of petty arrogance, Obama literally said to Romney the literal actual outloud words in English with his mouth, “While we were coordinating an international coalition to make sure these sanctions were effective, you were still invested in a Chinese state oil company that was doing business with the Iranian oil sector.”  What a punk.  A line fed to him of course by his punk advisers   Now I myself am in no way above saying something so small.  I want to win arguments, and I have no need to protect the dignity of any high office, so being crass is a legitimate tactic with me.  I'm no Jack Kennedy.  Obama is no Joe Biden.

Speaking of whom, the man 0 chose to succeed him said, to Navy Seal Tyrone Woods' grieving father at the memorial service, "Did your son always have balls the size of cue balls?"  Yes, Joe, and his dick was very big too.  Now, what body part shall we talk about, in reference to Joe?  Comments Mark Styne: "One assumes charitably that the vice president is acknowledging in his own inept and blundering way the remarkable courage of a man called upon to die for his country on some worthless sod halfway across the planet. But the near-parodic locker-room coarseness is grotesque both in its inaptness and in its lack of basic human feeling for a bereaved family forced to grieve in public and as crowd-scene extras to the political bigshot. Just about the only formal responsibility a vice president has is to attend funerals without embarrassing his country. And this preening buffoon of pseudo-blue-collar faux-machismo couldn’t even manage that."  Couldn't have said it better myself.

 But I digress.  Back to the super genius.  At the debate, 0 continued, "Well, Governor, we also have fewer horses and bayonets, because the nature of our military’s changed.  We have these things called aircraft carriers, where planes land on them.”  I've cited this great oratory before.  Allow me now to cite the incomparable Charles Krauthammer on this point: "This is 0bama’s case for fewer vessels? Does he think carriers patrol alone? He doesn’t know that for every one carrier, ten times as many ships sail in a phalanx of escorts? 0bama may blithely dismiss the need for more ships, but the Navy wants at least 310, and the latest Quadrennial Defense Review Independent Panel report says that defending America’s vital interests requires 346 ships (versus 287 today)."

Logic is a dying art -- went out with the study of Latin, and Shakespeare, and classical (rather than  loose) rhetoric.  We'll find out if it is thoroughly dead, come Election Day.

You are very dumb.


J

Culture

Allow me to demonstrate my meaning, re Mohammad Ali. Reading something by Budd Schulberg, on boxing. Only okay, but I like the subject. He knew Ali, traveled with him to Zaire for the Rumble. Once, just before the fight with Norton, Ali was goofing about acting with Schulberg's wife, actress Geraldine Brooks. Scene set.

Then the mischievous Ali had another idea. "Let's go to the middle of the lobby and you turn on me and in a loud voice call me nigger." Again Geraldine obliged. As they were walking long, Gerry the consummate actress suddenly stopped. "Damn you, Ali, I came up here to do a photo shoot on you and you backed out on my! You promised!" Ali improvised, "Don't bother me, lady. I never promised you nothin', now leave me alone." Then Gerry dropped it on him. "You know what you are, you're just a god-damn lying nigger!"

Ali's bodyguards, his sparring partners, his entourage, the whole bristling Ali brigade started moving in with bad intentions, and I was thinking that this time Ali the mishcief maker had gone too far. But at the last moment Ali announced that this whole mad scene was this idea -- they were just practicing acting together -- and the tension dissolved in nervous laughter.

Okay. There it is. So what? Well first, you never disrespect a man's wife. If you do, you apologize, and mean it. Perhaps some reader fails to see the disrespect? I commend him to his conscience. Ali put a woman in danger. More telling, consider the thugs Ali surrounded himself with, who would menace a woman. Bodyguards? Arrogance-guards. Maybe you don't get it. When I read it I was disgusted. Followers, entourage, hangers-on, pilot fish, take their lead from the shark. Ali hired and surrounded himself with scum who would intimidate a woman. End of story.

How Obama-like. Either O is lying about the murders in Lybia, or he employs liars who lie to him. "But every piece of information that we got as we got it we laid it out for the American people," he averred to Lefty intellectual-leader slash funnyman Jon Stewart. Not true. Email to the White House Situation Room, here.

Note the date: 9/11. Note the time: a half hour after the attack started. Note the information: "approximately 20 armed people" is not "a flash mob of protesters incensed over a months' old Youtube video." Both the Benghazi Consulate and the American Administration's pants have suffered catastrophic fire damage.

We had troops an hour away, in Italy, and a Delta squad 2 hours away. The terrorist mortar position was laser-targeted by our side. But ... nothing.

If Obama gets or takes any credit at all (one cannot in this context call it 'responsibility') for the bin Ladin-killing, does he get any credit for the Chris Stevens-killing? These Americans died not because of Obama's indecision. It was because of his decision.

Feckless dithering hypocrite coward.

At best, Obama has surrounded himself by liars. He has allowed a culture of indifference, expedience and deceit to thrive around him, which is inimical and crippling to good governance. Excusing him from any other failing, this alone disqualifies him from the office of high honor he would continue to hold.


J