Cry Havoc and let slip the SUVs of war.

A jabbering baboon at a website called "Blogs for Bush" had this to say about the Tom Delay indictment, referring to the Democratic party, I'm assuming:

"This is not the actions[sic]* of a political Party engaged in seeking a majority - it is the action of a Party determined to destroy its opponents entirely and seize all power for itself...it is, in short, the stuff from which civil wars are made..."

Now I've never been in a physical confrontation in my life. I've only fired a gun on a mere handful of occasions. I am, as a matter of fact, a goddamn gimp. If armed conflict were to break out in the United States, I'd most likely end up as a pile of minced organs in the bottom of a smoking crater. But if these motherfuckers want to go to war to maintain the power of a mob of power-mad, corrupt, criminal scumfucks who won't rest until this country is jointly ruled by the Book of Leviticus and the Wal-Mart Employee Manual, I for one couldn't be happier.

Like I said, I'd probably die in the conflagration, but at least I'd take a few of them with me. Sure, probably not any of the Ted Nugent-type survivalists who would surely rally to the Red banner: those guys are generally rangy, adept at firearms, and good with the bobbing and weaving. But I'm pretty sure that I could take out a whole platoon of squishy, fat-ass suburban reactionaries; the type of limp dicks who generate a sense of personal empowerment by identifying with the actions of the military, read a lot of Tom Clancy, but don't get any closer to danger in their day-to-day lives than eating that morning McMuffin. No doubt, if a civil war came, they'd sign up in droves to prove their manhood and skin a few leftist hippie pelts. They'd waddle into battle in their Dockers, ass-fat slapping in the breeze, and I'd mow them down with a belt-fed M-60: me, a frail, near-sighted commie faggot, would personally bury more than a few pig-eyed suburban brownshirts.

And then I'd probably get garrotted by the sea-shell necklace of some College Republican douchebag in an Abercrombie & Fitch flak jacket.

C'est la guerre...

*[sic] is an editorial term for "this motherfucker is too dumb to string a sentence together without his Cheetoh-coated fingers murdering the English language with each butter-soaked keystroke."

The Best Birthday Present I've Ever Received.

You know, it's easy to look upon the world, upon life, upon the central paradoxes and travails of existence, and despair. We live in an artificial, hermetic universe of synthetic experience: fake food, fake drink, fake emotions, fraudulent conceptions of what it means to connect with other human beings, or even to perceive ourselves as individuals. Worst of all, there are no meaningful avenues of expression left to us: all transmission systems are co-opted to the purpose of a corporate hive mind that assimilates all dissent and commodifies all angst. What we are left with, too often, is a life of numb compliance, mild discontent that rests in the stomach like a bit of bad roast beef that is never digested, a life that never achieves visceral satisfaction or even visceral horror. We will die, most likely, without ever having tasted blood in our mouths. So, in other words, life can be a downer.

But then, something really hilariously wonderful will happen and the clouds will part, if only for a moment, to let you bathe in the pure rays of sunshine.

Tom Delay got his greasy ass indicted today.

It feels like a batch of honey-dipped kittens are nuzzling my small intestine.

My god, I'm turning into Andy Rooney!

I have to write about this shit: there's a show on Comedy Central these days called "Too Late with Adam Carrolla" that is, without a doubt, the least funny thing in the history of the universe of the galaxy. It's so unfunny that prolonged exposure to it will actually reduce your ability to be funny or to appreciate humor. If you watch it, the part of your brain that identifies and produces irony, absurdity and other comedic properties will slowly liquify, and is replaced by an image of your mother being raped by Carrot Top, projected onto your corneas.

Also in the field of TV banality, there's a show on FX network called "Over There" that is unique in television history. It is the first weekly television series to depict an ongoing war: it's about U.S. troops in Iraq. The other amazing thing about this show is that, while it's the first televised depiction of an ongoing war in TV history, NO ONE GIVES A SHIT. The show is so obsessed with avoiding taking a stand on the war, or depicting plots that raise any sort of question about the war, that it might as well be about World War Two. Not to mention the fact that the plots are heavy on home-front family soap opera bullshit and recycled premises from cop shows.

The moral of the story: TV makes you retarded.

On the other hand, who wouldn't want Retard Strength?

Hey, Hey, Ho, Ho...ah, forget it.

Today, I attended my first anti-war march in D.C. Absolutely massive: north of 100,000 people, easily. Pleasingly, the percentage of gray-bearded, broken down hippies and, even more loathsome, young, smelly neo-hippies, was startlingly low. For the most part, the demographics of the rally were similar to a Summerfest crowd: young people, old folks, hippies, hipsters, punks, wide-bottomed soccer moms, grampas, grammas, yuppies, clergy, college kids and, of course, hot young chicks (I may be anti-war, but I'm staunchly pro-tits) The politics were similarly diverse: anarchists, socialists, ANSWER-type Stalinists, the Communist Party-USA, libertarians, Democrats, even a few alienated Republicans were all in attendance. The day started with a rally on the south lawn of the White House: Cindy Sheehan, George Galloway, and a bunch of other folks talked for an unnecessarily long time. Annoyingly, there was a bunch of loose talk about non-Iraq issues (end U.S. imperialism in Haiti? Haiti?), but for the most part, it was a well-focused presentation, with a lot of emphasis on New Orleans and the relationship between the gratuitous suffering there and the diversion of National Guard troops to Iraq.

The march featured some of my least favorite components of the genus political demonstration: excessive chanting ("Hey, hey, ho, ho...1,2,3,4...this is what democracy looks like...what do we want? Peace! When do we want it? Now!"...the people united can never be defeated...all the lame 60s retreads you can think of) and big, dumb-looking puppets that look like junior high school art projects...that will BLOW YOUR MIND! And bongos. Goddamnit, I hate bongos. How the fuck does a bongo signify opposition to war? Are you banging out "Troops Out Now" in Morse code, you patcholi-soaked burnout?

It was still a charged experience: thousands of people crushed together, making their way through downtown Washington. For a moment, you could feel the power of mass mobilization...until you realized that the parade route was a giant, fenced in circle next to the Mall. Then you could feel the return of flailing impotence.

The jerk-ass counterdemonstrators were there, of course, many of them combat aged, physically fit young men who apparently think that waving a sign at some chick in a peasant blouse is a greater blow to their terrorist enemies than actually toting a weapon in the cause they believe in. I counted less than a hundred, total, and I'll be willing to bet dollars to cockrings that they get as much play in the media accounts of the march as the hundreds of thousands of anti-war demonstrators.

Celebrity sightings: Ward Churchill, the most hated Indian since Crazy Horse, waiting for a bus, Al Sharpton (damn fine hair process you've got there, Al), Harry Belafonte (day-o!), Jim Hightower, and your mom.

Best signs: "End the Mass Killings: Iraq, Darfur, Canada's Seals" and "The Politics of Failure Have Failed!" Simpsons references will always score high with me, especially references to Citizen Kang: Best. Political Satire. Ever.

The whole experience was interesting, but as I left, the inevitable surge of futility overtook me: us protestors all undoubtedly feel better about ourselves for marching, but beyond that, I don't know what effect we could possibly have. The media will downplay the massive demonstration (with Rita making landfall, it's that much easier) and even if they didn't, most Americans think protesting is sort of gay: too much drumming, too many long haired men, too much earnestness. I'll admit it myself: as a card-carrying member of the Irony Generation, all that passion is a little discomfiting, especially when you're right in the middle of it. My overpowered self-consciousness chip is part of the reason that I can't bring myself to chant and sway as I march, but mainly I don't want to fully embrace the self-satisfaction of righteous protest. I fear that making yourself feel better is the only reason to do this sort of thing, and so I figure if I don't feel any better afterward, then feeling better isn't the only reason. If that makes sense.

Pro-Life Politics for the 21st Century.

During the Roberts confirmation hearings, Kansas Senator Sam Brownback, a staunch (code for fucking nuts) conservative opponent of abortion, brought along a very unusual visual aid, a visual aid who loves McNuggets. It was a 14-year old girl with Down's Syndrome named Abby Loy. Brownback showed her off as an illustration of one of the less well-known aspects of the abortion issue: the extremely high rate of abortions performed on fetuses identified as possessing the genetic precursors for Down's Syndrome. About 80% of pregnancies diagnosed with the genes are aborted. Brownback poked the young, smiling Abby with a pencil as she danced about in glee, making the argument that it is morally wrong to deny people like her the right to live due to a genetic disorder. There's an argument to be had there, I'm sure, but it's an argument designed to engage people already inclined to opposes abortion. Brownback is forgetting a crucial constituency with his line of reasoning: people (I won't name names) who want to turn retarded folks into surgically enhanced sex slaves! These people probably don't give a shit one way or another about abortion, abortion having nothing to do with retarded sex slaves, but they could be swayed decisively to the pro-life side by making this point: if fetuses with Down's Syndrome are aborted at such high rates, who can be turned into bio-engineered sex robots? It's a sobering thought that could easily turn more than a few votes to the Red column.

Can't Miss Movie Pitches the Second!

Back, by popular demand, more of my guaranteed blockbuster movie ideas. Take, use, become fat with wealth from my genius.

Idea One:

Freddy v.s. Jason v.s. James Garfield: It's a well-known fact that kids love pizza, and they love squalor! They also love recreations of presidential assassinations as performed by their favorite horror bad guys! See Freddy enter President Garfield's dreams in the form of rival Republican presidential candidate James G. Blaine, see Jason chop up an entire battalion of the Grand Army of the Republic! Nick Nolte cameos as Charles Giteau, the hapless drifter who is framed for the assassination.

Idea Two:

Sexual Heeling: The distraught ex-boyfriend (the part screams Affleck!) of an obedience school trainer (Nick Nolte in a sundress) infiltrates her class disguised as a basset hound in order to win back the love of his life! The third-act conflict comes as Affleck must choose between continuing his pursuit of the woman who scorned him, or accept the affections of a classmate: a randy German shepard named Peaches.

Idea Three:

A Barrel of Chimpanzees Electrocuted with Cattle Prods: Self-explanatory. Nick Nolte as the the barrel.

Can't Miss Movie Pitches.

I just watched "Overnight", a documentary about "Boondock Saints" director Troy Duffy, his unprecedented screenplay sale to Miramax, his astounding assholishness and hubris, and his highly amusing and utterly total collapse. Duffy is revealed to be a racist, sexist, brain-dead, singularly narcissistic douchebag whose film aesthetic makes Quentin Tarantino look like Kurasowa in the maturity department. But also on display is the terrifying capriciousness of the film business, where Industry assassins grind up the hopes and dreams of countless would-be writers and directors and snort them off of the asses of transexual hookers. When Duffy goes before a group of film students at Boston University after Miramax has chewed him up, spit him out and placed a black mark on his film that makes it untouchable by all other studios, he tells them, basically, to give up. And as much as a scumfuck as he is, it's hard not to agree with him.

So I'm jettisoning any lingering dreams I may have had of becoming a film writer or director. And to show how serious I am, I'm putting my can't miss movie ideas, which I have guarded for years with a badger's tenacity, out onto the Internets for all to see. Let someone with a heart greater than mine take them to the City of Broken Dreams and spin this shit into gold. If you can make it through the Hollywood minefield intact, you're welcome to all the riches, glory, and candy-coated blowjobs you can get your hands on.

Super Awesome Mega Cool Movie Idea Number One:

Cool Runnings 4000: The year 4000: humans are an endangered species, refugees from a destroyed Earth who wander the galaxy, hunted by intergalactic bounty hunters. Humans haven't competed in the Universal Nuclear Winter Olympics in centuries. It's up to a motley band of Space Jamacians to enter the 2000 Light Year Rocket Bobsled competition. There's only one small problem...they don't know how to ride the rocket bobsled! They enlist the help of grizzled ex-rocket bobsled champ Nick Nolte, and the cryogenically frozen head of John Candy to train them. Will they win the Plutonium Medal away from the evil Robotic Rocket Bobsleds, who've won for five hundred consecutive Olympiads? Or will John Candy's thirst for human brains derail their chances?

Mega Awesome Super Cool Movie Idea Number Two:

Gay Midget-Palooza: The two biggest trends in young male comedy going, midgets and homosexuality, together at last! Throw in some full-grown tits, and it'll make Wedding Crashers numbers look like Arrested Development's viewership. Nick Nolte on his knees plays King TinyQueer the First.

Cool Super Mega Awesome Cool Movie Idea Number Three:

Blowjob: The Movie: It's a no-brainer: if people love the sex act, they'll love the film! Nick Nolte plays the penis.

Just you watch: some young go-getter with a spine, talent, vision, and the willingness to jettison all of those traits in a seconds notice for a single swipe at glory will turn these ideas into million-dollar pitches.

Apocalypse Wow!

It has been recently brought to my attention that this blog's obsession with the end of the world makes it about as cheerful as a bathtub full of rotting clown carcasses. What I think is being missed is how much FUN Armageddon is going to be!

For one thing, you'll never be bored again. Whether your time is spent trying to flee the burning wreckage of a burning, plague-ravaged city while losing as few of your family members to crazed militia bands and tube-neck along the way, or trying to start a fire from twigs in a refugee camp, you'll never have to worry about finding a way to entertain yourself again.

Similarly, all that post-industrial angst we've all been wearing around our necks like burning tires of existential despair vanish in the time it takes for martial law to be declared and the rape gangs to hit the streets. No time to wonder what your purpose in life is, whether or not you're exploiting someone when you buy a fleece pullover, whether you're destroying the environment every time you get in the car, if you're wasting your life when you turn on the television. Your purpose in life will finally be clear: SURVIVE!

Speaking of the environment, nothing is going to stop global warming except for a world-ending catastrophe, so that'll be good in the long run.

And the Republicans won't be running things anymore. That'll be fun. As a matter of fact, the fat-ass, neutered suburban marshmallows who find their only sense of power in life in the destruction wrought by their countries military will die in swarms. When the Big Ugly hits Mall-topia, these doughy sadists will watch, paralyzed, the scene on their plasma screens of the panicked hordes descending upon them.





The above douches will wait for Jesus and the 42nd Airborne to save them, and it won't happen. They'll be forced to take the death-fetishism that leads them to worship blood-drenched military machinery as the embodiment of the Sacred and do their own killing in the name of. They'll die, and kill, and will scatter into the winds, and, most importantly, THEY WON'T HAVE ANY MORE GODDAMN POWER! Who wouldn't trade undetermined decades of numb mundanity and spiritual abnegation for the chance to view such a reckoning?

And, of course, there's the slim glimmer of hope for the aftermath. The murmur of a chance that things could be different, something better could rise from the ashes. Communities based on trust, sharing and mutual aid, devoid of hierarchy, greed, and militarism. People living for the love of each other, instead of the love of accumulation, domination, status. Not likely, but goddamn it, POSSIBLE.

Even if it doesn't happen, the fireworks will still be a hoot and a half.

Political Calculus in the Age of Retarded:

Bush=Jesus=A shitload of high-end military ordinance capable of incinerating, disemboweling, and vaporizing thousands of people from long distances, not to mention small arms for when you want that personal touch of looking the person in the eye when you put a bullet into it.

or, expressed in denotation:

=

=

Express the degree to which these people are soulless cockholes in positive integers. Show your work.

What'll it be, Heat Death or the Big Crunch?

In the field of astrophysics, an unsettled and deeply intriguing question is: how is the universe going to end? One popular theory holds that the universe, which has been continuously expanding since the Big Bang, will continue to do so indefinitely, until all of the energy of that initial explosion has been spent, at which time the lights all gutter out . Party's over. Another, infinitely more interesting theory, the Big Crunch, posits that the universe will expand continuously until a given point of maximum stress when, like a rubber band, it snaps back, contracting at the same rate that it expanded, until all the matter of the universe imploded back into the pre-universal speck that preceded the Big Bang. Recent data has pretty much confirmed that we're in for a long, slow, steady expansion into the nothingness of entropy. No Big Crunch coming.

Needless to say, when I found out, I was bummed.

All around us are signs of a looming End. If you've been at all paying attention during this century, you can't help but get a sense that all of the wires that suspend us comfortable Americans above the abyss of Hobbesian struggle for existence are beginning to fray. Cheap oil, the lubricant of empire, is running out. Climate change continues to destabilize the environment. The imaginary economy is losing its necessary impenetrable mystery. And let's not forget the potential wild cards in the deck: global pandemic and nuclear annihilation.

It's scary, but maybe not as scary as the alternative. The Heat Death of civilization. When I think about the current carnival of grotesque excess and soul-crushing mundanity grinding on and on and on, mummifying us, drying us out into human shaped husks of dead flesh, I find myself secretly yearning for the iron broom of history to sweep it all away in one bold, charismatic stroke. To be there, to witness the destruction of all that is familiar, and homogenized, and commericalized, and exsanguinated by banal efficiency, might be worth trading an uninterrupted lifetime of mundane suffocation.

But probably not.

Shit, I should just get a hobby or something.

People who make me want to Live, and People who make me want to Eat Fiberglass and Dead Fetuses until my Organs Burst

Guess Which Ones Are Which.

John Roberts: Satan's Cabbage Patch Kid.

My god, I can't wait for the Roberts confirmation hearings to end! An empty charade that is nothing more than an opportunity to see firsthand how truly pompous, witless and moronic the members of the Judiciary Committee are. Joe Biden, as usual, talks like a gunsel in a thirties gangster movie, but puts up a fight like a moistened schoolgirl. Chuck Schumer yammers like the utter prick he is. Ted Kennedy sounds like a mixture of Barney Gumbel and Jabba the Hut. Tom Coburn and Jeff Sessions show why some sort of IQ tests (not to mention psych evaluations) should be mandatory for congressional candidates, and Arlen Spectre is just creepy. Meanwhile, Roberts sits there, listens to the boozy wind gust off of the committee dais, and then proceeds, again and again, to sound brilliant, articulate and informed, while not saying a goddamn thing about what kind of judge he would be.

The few nuggets of potentially pertinent information Roberts has let slip so far are a mixed bag for those obsessed with the prospects of Roe v. Wade in a Roberts court. Roberts has made a lot of noise about his belief in stari decicis and the value of precedent in the law, which suggest that he might very well decline to overturn Roe, which has been reaffirmed by 38 subsequent S.C. decisions. But, of course, like almost every nominee, he just won't give any hint about how he would apply all of his high-minded judicial philosophies to the job of, you know, judging. So it's up in the air.

Still, if I had to put money on it, I'd bet that Roberts is NOT going to vote to overturn Roe, because Republican strategists like Karl Rove, who has publicly declared his goal of creating a generation of Republican hegemony in America, DON'T WANT ROE TO BE OVERTURNED! Abortion is the single most important engine for grass roots conservative political mobilization of the past thirty years. It's the unholy affront to decency that so many Christians see in legal abortion that has done more than any other issue to meld Christianity and the Republican party in the popular mind. The power of this issue is contingent on the perpetual outrage provoked by legal abortions, especially legal abortions decreed from the Supreme Court instead of through legislative means. If the Supreme Court were to overturn Roe, thereby returning the issue of abortion legality to the individual states, all of that righteous fury and mobilizing energy would be re-directed into state politics. Meanwhile, the mere majority of Americans who favor legal abortion but, having never really lived in danger of experiencing the alternative, are currently complacent about the issue, would become the new center of mass politics. The momentum, as it were, would switch to the pro-choice side. In politics it's easier to play offense than defense: defense holds the aforementioned danger of complacency. Meanwhile, when you challenge the status quo, not only are you harnessing a more aggrieved and therefore more energetic power base, but you don't really need immediate results to keep them happy. Power players like Rove, who dream of perpetual Republican dominance, require perpetual Republican outrage. Losing the abortion issue on the federal level would be the worst possible thing for their long-term plans. So, it wouldn't surprise me a bit if they put up Roberts knowing he was a cautious, stari decisis Anthony Kennedy type and not a Scalia bombthrower, and trusted in the long-held practice of nominees not revealing their intentions to mask that fact from their base.

While the abortion issue is being chewed over by both sides, no one of course notices that Roberts is most definitely a pro-corporate, anti-labor judge who would have fit right in with the nineteenth century robber barons, handing out injunctions against striking workers with a stogy in one hand and a snifter of brandy in the other. And the game will continue: the high court failing to relieve the outrage of the Republican mass base while gratifying the wildest dreams of the real Republican base: that pesky upper 1 percent.

Greatest American Ever:

Forget all the usual suspects, your Lincolns, your Roosevelts, your Washingtons, all those power-mad, bloodletting douche nozzles whose only real claims to fame are wars started and fortunes plundered. Forget also the politically correct choices, folks like your Martin Luther Kings and your Susan B. Anthonys. Sure, they were really good people, they fought for far-sighted and noble goals and did so effectively, but not a one of them could tell a decent dick joke. That is why Bill Hicks is the greatest American of all time. He spent twenty years beating against the stone walls of American cracker dumbassery, mixing dizzying hope and vision with blood-curdling bitter invective. He would stare out EVERY NIGHT at a sea of bleeting, drunken sheep and try to get their blood moving and brains firing for the first time in their entire lives by weaving an impossible combination of black humor and social insight. It didn't work forty five times out of forty six. The audiences surely filed out confused and angry, wishing they'd gone to see Gallagher smash fruit instead. But throughout this country, in the audiences he played to and in the bedrooms of young people finding his stuff on one of his albums or rare television apperances, thousands of individuals made personal communion with his words. And that's what made him the greatest American: the power of his words and worldview and sheer, blistering heart to alter the brain chemistry of young impressionable minds on an individual basis. He was a public performer, but his power was personal. Sure, he didn't save the world. But he did die young, killed, I'm sure, by his own broken heart and churning guts. The only hope is that his word virus continues to infect the unsuspecting youth of the nation, hollowing out our Empire of Hatred and Dumb-Assness from the inside. Listen to him, and pay him forward.

Dress Rehearsal for the Big Ugly II

Police in Suburbs Blocked Evacuees, Witnesses Report

These are public servants, answerable to the people. And when the people came, fleeing pestilence, chaos and dehydration, they sent the people running back into the abyss, plucking buckshot out of their behinds. Why? Good old fashioned racism, classism, fearmongering. New Orleans had been destroyed, and it was the fault of those who had stayed, the "looters", whose numbers were made up primarily of children, parents, and the elderly. These police officers could look at huddled masses of bedraggled and stricken people, obviously in distress, obviously helpless and harmless, and see waves of the iconic priapic, razor-wielding Negro rapist who has haunted the white Southern mind for centuries. They could point shotguns at them and send them to their deaths.

This is how things will be during the Big Ugly. When the economy collapses, stranding everybody but that lucky 1% in a Hobbesian nightmare, the forsaken aren't all going to take it lying down. Some of them will escape the cities, looking for sustenance and salvation in the rolling exurban hills. And there, they'll meet the local equivalent of the Gretna, LA police department, guns drawn, ready to happily open fire on the unfortunates. They might be private security people, but, as we've seen, they could just as easily be public officials. As we've seen, "protect and serve" means protecting the property and serving the interests of the white and the connected. That is always the case, of course, but during times of crisis the inhuman nature of that order, which is hidden during the slow motion carnage of the day-to-day, comes into stark relief.

There is One Man who can save us from the Apocalypse.

His name is Krumholtz.

Midnight at Bohemian Grove.

The child is taken in the middle of the day, and no one notices.

Her parents are sitting, swollen, in front of their television. They are weighed down by a combined fifteen pounds of cholesterol sitting in their circulatory system. Dorito crumbs and cockroachs race through their hair. Tapeworms and cancer cells plot treason in their dank colons. Brain tissue dries, cracks, flakes away. Gas fumes smell like rose petals.

The long black limo purrs through the street. The child watches from the back seat through tinted glass at smeared streaks of neon. She is pulled towards sleep by the rythmn.

She awakes in the woods. On a pyre. Staring up into the dead eyes of a giant wooden owl. She hears the murmurs around her, but she can't move her head to see. The voices are mummified, cracking with age and affluence. She can't see the faces, but the shadows dance across the trees: hunched, frozen, slavering. Some chant in a dead tongue, some mutter with restrained lust, others scream wordlessly into the wild. She hears a voice, one deeply familiar to her, one heard hundreds of times on television, float into her ear. The voice says "you will burn well, tender one." Faces fill her vision. They are starkly white, flesh hangs in sacks, lips curl back on hard white plastic teeth. Knives glint in the fire.

The body is discovered next to a McDonalds. The organs had been removed. Some suspect that they made their way into the McNuggets. No one notices.

I've run out of contemporary insults to hurl at the President.

I've been forced to revive olde timey ones:

Blackguard.

Poltroon.

Jackanape.

Mountebank.

Pillock.

Bampot.

Coxcomb.

Varlet.

Malt-worm.

Gudgeon.

Moldwarp.

Apple-john.

Pignut.

Whey-face.

Ratsbane.

Pumpion.

Dewberry.

Clotpole.

Skainsmate.

Puttock.

Crumbum.

Flapdoodle.

I'll post some more after I watch a few "Three Stooges" shorts.

New Orleans: Dress Rehearsal for the Big Ugly.

This is going to get kind of nutty, so let's get a few things straight right from the top: I don't think that the Bush administration WANTED New Orleans to be completely flooded, nor do I think that the FEMA-tards INTENTIONALLY let tens of thousands of people languish without food or water in the waterlogged ruins of the city for nearly a week. I don't think that they CARE that it happened, but it wasn't like they planned it.

However, for all the potential political fall-out that the botched relief effort might generate, in the long run, the New Orleans apocalypse will serve as good practice for the upper 1% when things got to shit on an international level.

The single unifying thread of the Bush administration's policy over the past five years has been the hollowing out of the federal government: cutting budgets, benefits, services, stuff you would think would be pretty goddamn essential (like, say, LEVEE MAINTENANCE AND IMPROVEMENT!) , and, when money is spent for politically expedient reasons (starting a cool war in Iraq, trying to bribe old voters with a Medicare drug benefit), financing it through borrowing, while cutting the taxes of the upper 1%. No matter the situation, no matter the crisis, no matter the cost, upper class taxes get cut. Even as congress reconvened to vote on a 10 Billion dollar aid package for hurricane-damaged areas, the first order of business is ending the estate tax permanently. Meanwhile, millions more Americans have fallen under the poverty line, health care costs and consumer debt spiral out of control, and the permanent underclass struggles through lives of unmanagable difficulty. The conditions that allowed so many to die in New Orleans did not start with the flood: they had been created by generations of systemic poverty and institutional neglect.

What's the long term goal here? It may not be conscious, but I believe that what the upper class is doing is essentially girding up for the end of the world. They are redirecting the flow of capital to such an extent that the gap in wealth between them and the other 98% of Americans (not to mention other 99.9999999999999999999% of the world's population), so that, when the government eventually collapses under the weight of its unmeetable social obligations, they will be able to survive. With their vast monies, they won't have to rely on a crumbling government and infrastructure. Gated communities, cleaned and sanitized by private contractors, guarded by private security details, travel via individual helicopters to visit their fellow oligarchs in other gated communities: safe, at all times, from the rabble, who will become more and more desperate as the tax-starved skeleton of the federal government begins to fall apart. Peak oil, the bursting of the housing bubble, rampant deficits, will combine to create an unprecedented, irreversible Depression.

The top 1% will be protected by the hermetically-sealed Halliburton universe that their tax breaks will buy for them. For the rest of us, American cities will all start to look like New Orleans on day three of the flooding. And the government will behave similarly. Witness the militarization of the Federal response to the New Orleans evacuation crisis: National Guard units surrounding the city, putting up cordons and preventing people from leaving the city, or the Superdome, at GUNPOINT. Witness the Hyatt hotel company sending a private convoy of water and food to the tourists and employees trapped in the New Orleans Hyatt on Wednesday while people were literally dying of thirst a block away at the Superdome. Witness those same tourists and employees being evacuated from the city on Friday BEFORE thousands of people who had been waiting at the Superdome for days in much worse conditions (National Guard soldiers even helped them with their bags). Witness the instant demonization of those who were trapped in the city, derided as looters, rapists, even insurgents (according to the Army Times). When the military finally entered the city, they talked of securing it, as if it were Tikrit.

This is going to be the drill from now on when the inevitable economic collapse causes cities across the country to fall into chaos. Those rich who had not yet repaired to the secure exurbs will be quickly spirited away, either by their private guards or the Army (even when the economy falls, there's always money for the Army, and plenty of people desperate enough to join, even if it means turning their guns on their own people). Everyone else will be corralled, contained, shot if necessary, and dehumanized into irrelevance by the media (there will always be a media: even the rich need distraction), and the destroyed cities will become permanent military encampments.

While the New Orleans disaster may prove sobering to those souls who worry about the capacity of their government to protect America, for the elite, it was a reassuring reminder that the government will always protect the right Americans.

Why isn't it legal to set these people on fire?

Another pearl of Katrina-related compassion from the mouth of a Bush, this time it's rusted vagina Barbara Bush:

""And so many of the people in the arena here, you know, were underprivileged anyway, so this (she chuckled slightly)--this is working very well for them."

These people have abdicated their status as human beings. They lack any semblance of humanity. They truly view those less wealthy than themselves as lesser beings. And they rule us.

And, of course, no compliment of patriotic Americans are going to gather the kerosene tanks and light the funeral pyres for these amoral, murderous corporate pirates. One of the big reasons for this is that so many white people, including a thundering dumbass blathering at the table next to me at dinner tonight, have bought the O'Reilly line that "a lot" of the people who stayed in New Orleans did so with the express purporse of looting the city. Now, I know that the words "a lot" are vague (intentionally so in this case), but I've got to figure that, to be accurate, A LOT must connote at least 30% of a given whole. Given that there were more than 50,000 people stranded in New Orleans after the levees broke, that would mean that 15,000 or so people were hanging back, just waiting for the chance to wade through a waste-high pool of sewer water to lift some Nikes from Payless. Sure it's racist, but it's also stunningly idiotic. A much of white folks will buy it, though, because it gives them a nice excuse to justify their lack of compassion or concern over the fate of a bunch of poor black folk that they where never going to be terribly moved by in the first place. And so, the reign of the Crimson King and his inbred whore-mongers continues.

We're Fucked.

I've recently posted about my hopes that the Hurricane aftermath would finally snap people out of their Bush-trance. It was the only way to stay sane while watching people scream for help and die in front of my eyes while FEMA and the National Guard sat on their asses waiting for that criminal fuckhead Bush to finish his guitar solo and order them in. The horror, the frustration, was too much to bear without envisioning a redemptive national awakening of conscience.

But now, with a bit more perspective, a bit less alcohol, some time to reflect, I can say that nothing will probably end up happening. The Bushites are crafting their cover story that it was all the New Orleans mayor and Louisiana governor's fault (Democrats, both!): his base, who already have limited empathy for a bunch of poor black people who were too "stupid" to leave the city before the hurricane (in the cars they didn't have, powered by the gas they couldn't afford), will buy it. Democrats and Bush-haters will, rightly, blame the feds. Instead of actually informing people about the reality of the situation, the press will move on to the next runaway Aruban teen, and let the mushy middle figure that it's another case of political "he said-she said" and shrug their shoulders: Football season is starting, after all. The Democrats will whimper like scolded curs, Republicans will end the estate tax and role on to another election victory based on whipping up hatred. (crazy black looters joining gays, atheists and Arabs in the pantheon of threats to the Nation)

Some people are saying that the oil pipeline disruption caused by the hurricane will have a massive impact on the nation's economy, that we're poised on the brink of social collapse. Then every smug, comfortable, full-bellied suburban cockroach who tut-tutted those unruly colored folks for stealing jewelry, will find themselves cut off, for the first time in their lives, from the conveniences and privileges that they consider their birthright.

To quote our president, I say: "Bring it on."

The Worst People in the World.

In the 1980s, as the apartheid controversy ripped through the U.S., Hunter Thompson boldly proclaimed that white South Africans, if they didn't knock off their heinous racist shit, would be considered THE WORST PEOPLE IN THE WORLD.

That phrase has always stuck with me. If the New Orleans disaster doesn't wake us the fuck up as a nation, then we will officially take up that mantle. If we let this shit go, if we don't ask the questions that beg to be answered and DEMAND a fucking answer from these incompetent, bloodless scumbags, then we will have abdicated all of our claims to genuine humanity, will deserve the worst that nature and man can offer.

Earlier today, I wrote, optimistically, about a potential satori moment in American politics, when the sheer horror, and the sheer lack of concern, competence and compassion among the ruling class will become impossible to ignore and we will collectively demand a real change. As horrible as what we've done in Iraq is, our blind complascence in that war is, to a degree, understandable: people, too busy to immerse themselves in the facts of the issue and traumatized by the September 11th terror attacks, trusted that their government was telling them the truth. This continuous murder in New Orleans is another story altogether: there is NO EXCUSE. There is NO EXPLANATION that does not conform to partisan bullshit. My earlier posts belied a goofy optimism in the character and intelligence of my fellow Americans.

Now, I'm drunk and it's past 1 in the morning, and America looks like a cold-blooded monster. Compassion, reflection, thoughtfulness, seem like completely foreign concepts. It seems much more likely that the Administration can hold out for a few months, talking about people who "chose" not to get out of New Orleans and those damn kill-worthy looters, waiting out the questions about Iraq and its impact on the hurricane relief effort until they can whip up some more hatred of gays or wild negroes. If that happens, if the potential mass realization that tantalizes behind every horrified newscaster's report from the disaster zone dies from our notoriously short memories, petty, stupid prejudices and penchant for distracting shiny objects, then we will pass forever out of the human family, becoming nothing more than vile, stupid, hateful pigs worthy of the blade.

"Viva La Muerte!"

Millan Astray was a gnarled gargoyle of a man. By the start of the Spanish Civil War, this founder of the Spanish Foreign Legion, a militant supporter of Franco's Nationalists, had lost his left arm and right eye fighting colonial wars in Africa. He was a bloodthirsty, war-ravaged tryant whose endorsement of Franco was driven more by a desire for continued warfare than any ideological commitment. He taught his Legionaires the rallying cry "Viva La Muerte!" or "Long Live Death!" The only thing that got his desiccated old pecker to stand at attention was the smell of gunpowder and the screams of the dying.

Right now, this country is being run by a pack of Millan Astrays: all of them in love with death and utterly disinterested in helping those who are still living. They are abetted by millions of tiny little Millan Astrays who are even more repellent than the original: at least he, for all his cruelty and blood-lust, paid a physical price for his addiction to murder. These modern day variants cry for carnage and death, but from the saftey and comfort of American living rooms, expounding from their ergonomic computer keyboards, commanding others to shed the blood for them, so they can enjoy the fireworks on Fox News without any threat of injury.

Witness the vile, scumfucking right-wing commenators (Jonah Goldberg, Mona Charen and Glenn Reynolds among them) who, having spent the last five years calling for the September 11th attacks to be met with blood, and blood and more blood spilled, demanding that the slow-motion massacre in Iraq continue indefinitely, now have to confront the non-terrorist-related disaster on the Gulf Coast. Without a Bin Laden to demonize and Arabs to destroy, the only comment that most of them can be bothered to make is to CALL FOR THE SUMMARY EXECUTION OF LOOTERS. Considering how many questions are raised by this tragedy, considering the massive charity mobilization that must take place to alievate the continuing misery, the only sentiment that these people, with their paid positions of punditry, can think to express is not compassion or righteous anger at the murderous ineptitude of the rescue operation, but rather the fantasy of machine-gunning people carrying big screen TVs. Only violent death dealt by vicarious authority figures can arouse their imaginations.

Allegorys R' Us.

From the A.P.:

"The evacuation of Superdome refugees was interrupted briefly when school buses rolled up so some 700 guests and employees from the Hyatt hotel.

They were move to the head of the line to be evacuated -- much to the amazement of those who had been crammed in the stinking Superdome for days.

The 700 had been trapped in the Hyatt just like the others, but conditions were considerably cleaner, even without running water, than the unsanitary crush inside the dome."


There she is a nutshell, folks, the fundamental, but almost entirely invisible (to the majority) impact that race and class have on Americans. Ten thousand impoverished black people, having spent the past five days in a literal hell, covered in filth, subject to violence, standing in the sun, in lines, for DAYS, are made to wait so that 700 presumable well-off, presumably white tourists and staff from a luxury hotel can be evacuated in front of them. And the shit of it is: for those people doing to evacuating, and the Hyatt evacuees, there is probably NO REALIZATION THAT ANY OF IT IS FUCKED UP.

And then, of course, there's this, from the Head Impossibly-Priviledged-Asshole-With-No-Consciousness-of-his-Priviledge, George Bush, in Mississippi:

"We've got a lot of rebuilding to do. First, we're going to save lives and stabilize the situation. And then we're going to help these communities rebuild. The good news is -- and it's hard for some to see it now -- that out of this chaos is going to come a fantastic Gulf Coast, like it was before. Out of the rubbles of Trent Lott's house -- he's lost his entire house -- there's going to be a fantastic house. And I'm looking forward to sitting on the porch. (Laughter.)"

What the fuck goes through a person's mind when they say something like that? Tens of thousands of black people are dying a hundred miles to his west and he's talking about the destroyed house of a Senatorial dickwad who HARKENS BACK FONDLY FOR SEGREGATION?

This shit is so utterly egregious that even a hardened cynic and misanthrope like me can't believe that it can go ignored. The bedrock racism and classism that has already condemned millions of Americans to second class citizenship and which has now MURDERED perhaps tens of thousands more, will have to be dealt with if there is even a shred of remaining collective decency left in this country: In the absense of a terrorist enemy to hate, our anger MUST finally turn to those who warrant it; the oblivious white upper class who let this happen, and don't see to have even registered the magnitude of their crimes, who see no crimes at all, but merely THE WAY THINGS ARE.

"That's all I can stands, I can't stands no more..."

New Orleans has turned into Bartertown, and George Bush didn't get back to Washington until YESTERDAY, after going to California to make insane comparisions between World War II and the war in Iraq and STRUMMING ON THE PRESIDENTIAL GUITAR. All while New Orleans was already flooding.

Now, tens of thousands of people in New Orleans are living in puddles of disease-riddled water, bodies rotting in the heat, shit-crazy, gun toting looters and rapists making like Janjaweed, with no food, no water, no police or National Guard presence, no transport out of town, FOUR DAYS AFTER THE HURRICANE HIT LAND! Why is this happening? The list is long: money diverted from levee-strengthening to the Iraq war, National Guard troops diverted to Iraq, a cold-bloodedly Randian pre-storm evacuation ("If you've got a car, get out of town! If you don't, grow gills, you poor douchebag!") and the fact that the entire federal government, starting with the Guitar-God-in-Chief, who took three days to even acknowledge what was happening, then cut his vacation short two days to look like he was actually doing something, acted like a pack of retarded midgets trying to drive a Hummer.

The only silver lining to be found in this horror show is the fact that the rescue operation has been such a Brobdignagian fuck-up, the consequences so bone-chillingly horrible, that people are actually demanding to know why. Why are the victims overwhelmingly poor and black? Why has it taken nearly a week to get any sort of effective force inside the city while people are literally dying to get out? These are the sort of questions that could lead to answers exceedingly uncomfortable to those in power. My hope is that this disaster could turn into the Anti-9-11: a devastating mass tragedy that, rather than bringing out the base, trollish violent nationalism in Americans, instead exposes compassion and, for the first time in my lifetime, THOUGHTFULNESS. Now, that is hugely optimistic, but there are some factors working in favor of such an outcome. Chiefly among them is the fact that there is no ENEMY that caused it. There are no "evil-doers" who transform all of the confused emotions that such an event triggers into pure, mindless hatred. Questions can't be shouted down by accusations of being "objectively pro-hurricane" or "supporting severe tropical weather systems." Without the escape valve of a foreign enemy to cathartically destroy, perhaps this nightmare can propell us towards a greater awareness of how far we've collectively fallen.