Actually Mr. Daniels, it is just a rag.

So I'm watching the pro-war circle jerk in Crawford on the teevee, and the images are of a bunch of sweaty, fat, flag-bedecked crackers on horses and motorcycles (just to make sure no one thinks any of them might be gay), holding charming signs calling Cindy Sheehan the "bitch in the ditch,” and making calls to "kick their ass and take their gas.” Did I mention they were fat?

Anyway, one of the organizers (who is a professional Republican political operative, by the way: there's your rightwing grass roots in action!) was flapping his gravy-filled jowls. "Cindy Sheehan is encouraging terrorists!" was the gist of it. The crowd, of course, mooed in agreement as, I’m sure, did millions of smooth-lobed fellow travelers across the nation. Of course, their excitement was not in any way dulled by the simple fact that the argument DOESN’T MAKE ANY GODDAMN SENSE!! One of these mullet-heads could sit me down for a week and not make the whole “dissent emboldens terrorists” idea plausible. Same goes for the “we’ve got to fight them there so we don’t have to fight them here” (or WGTFTTSWDHTFTH) drivel. I’m not going to go into WHY these arguments are retarded: that gives them too much credit and, frankly, it should be obvious to anyone who knows ANYTHING about the world or basic geography. All you need to know to disprove the WGTFTTSWDHTFTH thesis are the following facts: a.) Most of the insurgents in Iraq are native Iraqis b.) Iraqi was not a significant source of terrorists before the invasion and BAM! there goes the last Bush administration war rational.

So, the question arises: if these arguments are transparently false to anyone with the faintest familiarity with the facts of the situation, HOW can the “grassroots” organizations herd thousands of wool-noggins to pro-war demonstrations in the Texas sun where they can slag on a grieving mother? As in most situations, Occam’s Razor suffices: THESE PEOPLE DON’T HAVE THE FAINTEST FAMILIARITY WITH THE FACTS OF THE SITUATION!

Sure, some (like the organizers) are partisan hacks who would support Bush if he declared war on Narnia. But most of them earnestly believe that if we hadn’t invaded Iraq, there would be terrorists in their Lucky Charms. Now why would people who don’t know a goddamn thing about what they’re talking about feel strongly enough about the issue to waddle all the way to Crawford?

Partly, it’s because getting really worked up about things you don’t know anything about is an American pastime on par with date rape and killing hoboes for sport. Another significant factor is the centrality of symbolic meaning to contemporary “conservative” Americans.

To whatever degree “conservatism” was a rational theory based on observation of empirical data, that all started going out the window in the early 90s when Bush the First picked up an anti-flag-burning amendment to the constitution as an issue. For him, it was a cynical attempt to boost flagging support in the recessional aftermath of the first Gulf War, but for millions of Americans, the amendment became (and to some degree still is) a powerful rallying cry. It was (and is) a thunderingly stupid idea, but what matters is the WAY that is was stupid. The error of pro-amendment folk was the confusion of the SYMBOL of the American flag with the network of civil rights and duties that it represents. It’s the kind of mistake a five year old would make but one you would hope that an adult wouldn’t. Yet, millions of Americans made that mistake, continue to make the mistake, and are damned fierce about their mistaken beliefs.

I think that the reason grown ups make these sort of errors is due to their overwhelming belief in the literal power of symbols. The American flag has the power of a totem, as does George W. Bush, the World Trade Center, and the “Troops.” Now, the power that these icons hold is entirely contained within the confines of the right-wing brainpan, but in that murky depth, that power is absolute. These symbols don't connect to any system of observed phenomenon (none of these people have ever met George Bush, but are utterly confident in his status as an "authentic" American and all around old salt), but are instead constellations of emotional imagery that create powerful emotional responses. Facts are impervious to the blazing charisma of AMERICAN symbology. My god, these are people willing to shit on the constitution in order to protect a piece of cloth! What the hell is are they going to do with a quick overview of modern Middle Eastern history?

The virgins are trimming their wicks, and filling out their brackets.

Building on the idea of imminent apocalypse mentioned previously, I think it's time to start an End of the World Pool, because if people are dying by the millions, why not take the edge off of the horror by savoring a few dollars...that you can promptly burn in order to warm your cardboard shack and cook the toddler you stole from the refugee camp that day.

Some possible squares:

Nuclear annihilation (can't go wrong with the old standards)

"Day After Tomorrow"/"Waterworld"-style global-warming related environmental catastrophe

Terrorist-released biological attack

Bush-initiated economic collapse leading to social breakdown

Peak Oil Crisis (oil prices continue to skyrocket, leading to wars and the aforementioned economic collapse)

Avian Flu (That's where my money be at)

The Rapture (you can get odds with this one)

Zombies

Feel free to lay your money on any of the above or your very own.

To the Four People Who Read This Shit:

I want to remind you fellows that you are free to comment on any post I may make on this here blog: just click on the "comment" button at the end of the post. Go ahead and drop whatever question, comment, or random, all-caps exclaimation of "TITS!" you may desire. I would like very much to make this as interactive as possible.

Peace out.

"So the cops KNEW that Internal Affairs was setting them up?"

As previously mentioned, my main political home slice is Wisconsin Senator Russell "The Muscle" Feingold, a ballsy motherfucker who just raised his stock in my eyes another billion percent by being the first national Democratic figure to call for a timeline for withdrawal from Iraq while "serious" would-be presidents like Hilary Clinton and Joe Biden snivel a line of mindless, Bushian "stay the course" crap. It was the right thing to do and, perhaps coincidentally, though probably not, positions Feingold as potentially THE anti-war presidential candidate in 2008, when the idiotic debate about how many imaginary Universal soldiers we should send to the glowing crater formerly known as Iraq. If Feingold were to become a serious contender in 2008, it would create an unprecedented situation for me: a general election in which a candidate from a major party was something other than a corrupt, venal, power mad sociopath.

This brings us to a Terminator 2-type paradox: it is a vivid conviction of mine that ONLY corrupt, venal, power mad sociopaths CAN become president. Remember, the president of the United States is essentially hired during the primaries by the corporate order and his job while in office is to do as little as possible to threaten an exploitative and deadly status quo. The sort of cold-blooded disregard for ethics, personal relationships, principle and basic human decency that is required to crawl to the top of the sweaty clusterfuck of greasy-palmed politicians, coupled with the monomania necessary to WANT to have the job, means that no decent person could successfully run for president and stay decent. You have to have a pathological drive for self-aggrandizement at all costs that allows you to make any number of massive compromises in your most basic beliefs like Nixon, Clinton or Kerry, or a breathtaking vacuity without beliefs to compromise, like Ronald Reagan and the current vandal. You have to back-stab, sell-out, allow yourself to become a hollow vessel for the vision of donors and the media, you have to have your personality steamrolled into oblivion, smooth off every rough patch, reduce your formerly passionate and complicated political views into a simple, easily-digestible, meaningless paste. You have to repeat the same dead phrases until the very idea of political rhetoric being connected to actual policy or vision is as foreign as Sanskrit. When you finally take that oath to uphold the office of the president, anything even vaguely human has been buffed away like the finish on one of Condi Rice’s dildoes.

So, that means that if Feingold WERE somehow to emerge from a field of craven douche nozzles to claim the Democratic nomination, providing the American people with the first time in a century with someone WORTH voting for…it would already mean that he WASN’T worth voting for.

Shit, “Donnie Darko” wasn’t this confusing.

Balance tastes good in my tummy

So I'm watching the Paula Zahn show on the CNN and they're talking about shriveled fascist nutbag Pat Robertson and his creative solutions to America's foreign policy problems (namely wacking out those foreign leaders, like Venenzualen president Hugo Chavez, who could possibly cause us trouble), and Paula actually begins her report by asking the question: did Robertson go too far...or does he have a point? They then went on to detail the many crimes that Hugo Chavez has committed against the United States, namely that he has called George Bush bad names on numerous occasions, the whole time leaving the unstated idea lingering in the background: maybe we SHOULD just wack this dude out!

The sensible, ever-so-balanced folks at CNN can't just call out Robertson for the hateful cracker that he is, they have to take a few moments to give his ravings credence.

On the other hand...

Night of the Long Knives

The end of the world will be a disappointment. It’ll be a frat party at a small Midwestern liberal arts college: damp walls and listless drunks, poor lighting and a thumping baseline, guests slowly dwindling through the night until nothing’s left but a half-finished keg of Miller Lite and a few shucked condoms writhing in the shag carpet.

We have lost the capability to obliterate life on this planet impressively. Mutual Assured Destruction is a cozy memory, the days when it was a reasonable possibility that all life on the planet would end in one flash of light are gone. Now the most we can hope for is a biological plague to wipe us out, but without any real panache. Just months and months of increasing body counts and fraying infrastructure until finally the wheels of civilization fall off and the survivors scatter to the winds. Or maybe it’ll be unchecked environmental degradation slowly but steadily choking us to death on our own waste. Either way, it’s Armageddon without the money shot.

What made the Cold War so charismatic was that whole Dr. Strangelove promise that if things went bad, they were going all the way bad, and quick. One second you’d be watering your lawn or pledging allegiance to the flag, the next, you’d be a permanent shadow on the wall behind you. The planet would be awash in the man-made majesty of blooming mushroom clouds and radiation winds. Every species of every plant and animal ever catalogued by man and the thousands we never even knew about would go with us. Nothing left but a fried crust and maybe the cockroaches. Every destructive urge ever harbored in the secret human heart would find a moment of exultant apotheosis. It was a nice thought, comforting in a way: if we did somehow succeed in destroying ourselves, we would take down the whole planet in the process. None of those inferior beings would get to graze on the grass of our graves. No hypothetical future civilization would be able to look back on our folly with bemused dismay. We would be spared one of the great agonies of every poor bastard who has died until this point in time; we wouldn’t have to worry about missing anything. We would have the last laugh.

Now, when the end comes, it’s pretty much sure not to be with a bang, but rather the damned, dispiriting whimper T.S. Eliot warned us about. Ebola, smog, AIDS, medical waste, maybe some creative application of smallpox bacilli, one way or the other, there will be no painless, momentary triumph of the collective death urge; just millions of terrified lonely ends to millions of terrified lonely lives, bodies piling up like cordwood before the dwindling numbers of glassy-eyed survivors. And worst of all, the planet will have the last laugh. Weeds shooting up through cracks in the asphalt of deserted cities, deer grazing in the produce isles of vacant suburban supermarkets, and maybe, somewhere in the distant future, a group of wiser beings smiling crookedly at our non-biodegradable residue. My guess is that they won’t judge the Hardees California Raisins commemorative figurines kindly.

Cock-punching Cheney

Today I had lunch at a Chinese restaurant on Capitol Hill. In the lobby, there was a wall of signed portraits from various politicos who have eaten at the establishment, including Botoxed loser John Kerry and my main home-slice Russell "The Muscle" Feingold. One of the shots was Dennis Hastert, the fat sack of diseased pig lard who presides over the organized hate-fuck known as the house of representatives. He was standing next to the woman who I presume owns the restaurant, looking for all the world like he had just polished off everything on the menu and was mulling whether to dip the woman in mustard sauce and start chewing. I felt an instant surge of bile looking at his smug, vacant, foot-wide head. "If he were here right now..." I thought.

Then it dawned on me: he just might be!

Now, it turns out that Hastert was not there when I was, but the fact remains that he could have been. For my entire adult life, I've been hating the scumfucks who run this country from the comfortable distance of Wisconsin. I could watch Bush or, say, Rick Santorum on the C-Span and become consummed with rage, but the fact remained that they were a full days drive to the east of me and, as angry as I ever got, I was never angry enough to sustain a road trip to D.C. From now on, since I live in Alexandria, Virginia, the next time I see some well-lacquered dipshit spew a line of poisoned horse jizz, I'm really only a ten minute drive (excluding parking) away from planting my foot in his nutsack. Even worse, I could come face-to-face with one of these fuckers leaving a slime trail on the sidewalk mere feet away from me!

It'll take either Zen Buddhism or a nice Halcyon prescription to keep my off the Secret Service watch list.

And Starring Hugh Jackman as Little Red Riding Hood

"The Brothers Grimm" SHOULD be a movie I'm dying to see. I certainly was dying to see it when I only knew the basics: movie about the Grimm brothers directed by Terry Gilliam. But once I started seeing the trailer, I got cold feet. At first, I couldn't figure out what was wrong, but now I know: it looks EXACTLY like "Van Helsing," another movie I was dying to see until I watched a trailers. It's got the same shakey Gothic CGI, the same Black Forest-Oktoberfest setting, the same scruffy facial hair...it's even got crossbows, fer-chrissakes! Pass.

The Crux of the "Chickenhawk" Issue

A lot of bandwidth on these here Internets has been spent debating the "chickenhawk" question. Namely, is it valid to criticize healthy, military-age war supporters (paging Ben Shapiro and every college-age douche nozzle with a clam shell necklace and a copy of Toby Keith's Shock'n Y'all in their Jeep Grand Cherokee) for not enlisting in the military to fight in Iraq for the cause they have been so vocal in advancing?

The answer, of course, is yes, and yes for one simple reason. The war in Iraq is teetering on the brink of disaster due to a laundry list of Bush administration fuck-ups and the criminal stupidity (not to mention stupid criminality) of the whole venture, but one of the biggest problems is the massive, critical recruiting shortfall in the armed forces. The current troop strength in Iraq is already insufficient for the task (whatever the hell it may be) and the numbers are likely to go down rapidly as the military runs out of ways to manipulate the over-taxed regular army and stretching the active duty tours of reserve and National Guard units. Back home, reasonable young people are not lining up for the opportunity to catch shrapnel in Tikrit, even for that juicy scholarship package because, let's be honest, what good is going to frat parties if you have to shotgun your beers through a hole in your neck? Because there are so few fresh troops ready to send to Iraq, it is far more likely that the U.S. will pull out before "finishing the job" (a phrase just as meaningless and deadly now as it was thirty years ago) than is the possibility of maintaining a strong presence or increasing the troop numbers. As such, if one were a fervent believer in the U.S. mission in Iraq, and one were able-bodied and in the right age bracket to volunteer, one would be OBLIGATED by their convictions to go to Iraq and help shore up the U.S. military position. To ignore the shortage of soldiers is to abet the eventual withdrawal of American forces.

Bottom line: since a shortage of soldiers is the most serious threat to continued American occupation of Iraq, those who believe that Iraq still needs a mess of occupation have no plausible excuse not to join the fight there. Period.

The Brewers Vex Me

So, the Brewers were shut down three games in a row at home (where they've been excellent)by the ass end of the Cardinals pitching rotation, then go to Houston, where they NEVER win, and hand Roger Clemens his ass on a platter.

What the hell.

Is the Bush Administration Fascist?

Short Answer: Nope.

Slightly Longer Answer: George W. Bush doesn't have the imagination to be a fascist, and Dick Cheney's too busy counting his money to put up any kind of kampf about anything.

However, and this is the main reason that so many lefties bring up the spectre of Nazism and fascism when they talk about Bush and company: at least 25% of Bush's supporters ARE fascist. George Bush is not interested in the kind of total social mobilization that is the goal of fascism: he wants a public as disengaged, self-absorbed and distracted as possible: keep the taxes low, send the poor kids to do the fighting, and let the next guy deal with the fallout while as much cash as possible is shoveled to the upper one percent.

Sometimes, especially during elections and when the polls are shakey, Bush likes to pull out some moves from the fascist PR playbook to work that 25% into a frenzied lather. A good example of that would be the uber-creepy "Freedom Walk" being planned for September in D.C. (I'm hoping I can check it out), which is being designed to boost flagging support for the Iraq war by reminding people of September Eleventh and dazzling the rubes with formation marching and the soothing reactio-country sounds of Clint Black.

It's those rubes who are pinning for total social mobilization around the twin poles of radical domestic Christianization and a foreign policy of perpetual war against alien cultures that represent fascism's face in the United States. Bush and company will always care more about money than about Christ, but the true believers are dreaming of a Bush-lead New Age, in which secular humanists, atheists, Muslims, gays and sundry unbelievers are swept away by a government in which democratic institutions have been replaced by a neanderthal vision of Christianity that guides all lawmaking.

Historian Robert O. Paxton's book The Anatomy of Fascism offers a list of what he calls "mobilizing passions" which form the basis for mass fascist movements. Any of this ring bells?

"A sense of overwhelming crisis beyond the reach of any traditional solutions."

"The primacy of the group, towards which one has duties superior to every right, whether individual or universal, and the subordination of the individual to it."

"The belief that one's group is a victim, a sentiment that justifies any action, without legal or moral limits, against its enemies, both internal and external." (Apparently the 9/11 attacks justify any horror or crime against humanity: witness right-wing reaction to Abu Ghraib)

"Dread of the group's decline under the corrosive effects of individualistic liberalism, class conflict, and alien influences." (Stop me if you've heard any of this!)

"The need for closer intergration of a purer community, by consent if possible, or by exclusionary violence if necessary."

"The need for authority by natural leaders (always male), culminating in a national chief who alone is capable of incarnating the group's destiny."

"The superiority of the leader's instincts over abstract and universal reason." (Fuck the reality-based community, Bush creates new worlds with every trip to the bathroom!)

"The beauty of violence and the efficacy of will, when they are devoted to the group's success." (Fox News ran clips of the air bombardment of Bagdad with accompanying musical score...seriously)

"The right of the chosen people to dominate others without restraint from any kind of human or divine law, right being decided by the sole criterion of the group's prowess within a Darwinian struggle." (The right might not like evolution much, but they're sure down with "survival of the fittest")

Spend some time on FreeRepublic.com or Little Green Footballs (if you can stomach it), listen to the crazy spewing from the mouth of your radicalized relatives or co-workers and see how many of these "passions" you can identify within a week. Bush might not have the vision to see a New Christian World Order, but his sign-wavers and goose-steppers sure do. Paxton also stresses that a significant crisis in the democratic order must occur for the ruling class to turn to a fascist movement to save them from revolution from the left or social collapse. We're not there yet, but imagine what might happen if the economy collapses or the U.S. is hit with a nuclear or biological terror attack. These rubes, who until now have been content to write checks, go to rallies and write brain-numbingly stupid letters to the editor, might find themselves some leaders who will give their vision of the world more than lip service. (Rick Santorum has the glassy eyes and droolingy insane rhetoric of a True Believer.)

Because it is bitter, and because it is my heart...

So it's come to this: one more violently self-absorbed, pampered, aimless voice nattering away into the cyber-void. One more whining, powerless, dyspeptic, no-dick Internets loser ranting about the slo-motion horror show of American decadence and destruction as an excuse to avoid doing anything about it. All for the reading pleasure of literally dozens of fellow political eunuchs. Why? What purpose does it serve?

Absolutely none.

However, since I'm currently languishing in a crap-job purgatory having recently moved to within a brick's toss of Capitol Hill, and in command of the first home-based Internets connection I've had since finishing college, I figure I may as well burn away the hours before sleep with a few salvoes of vitriol directed at the idiocy and/or malice of the American people and their vile, corrupt and blood-coated leaders. Why not? We're all just making time until the Apocalypse, so what's a little masturbatory self-righteousness between friends?