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