Wednesday, March 31, 2010

The up-downside of power

The goal of every culture is to decay through overcivilization; the factors of decadence—luxury, skepticism, weariness and superstition—are constant. The civilization of one epoch becomes the manure of the next.
Cyril Connolly

Power rots. It does so slowly and subtly as one moral threshold after another is crossed and at each threshold another piece of the soul is left behind. Firebomb Tokyo? Sure. Level Dresden? No sweat. Waterboard and torture? Not a problem. All the time the searing light of hubris blinds the soul to its journey of self destruction.

Those enfolded in the blanket of prosperity and luxury know only boredom and ennui, which is why they climb rocks, run marathons, pump themselves up as “iron men,” bungee jump, skydive and subject their bodies to multiple forms of self mortification just so they can delude themselves into believing they are alive. It is within the boredom of prosperity that the serene barbarity of the civilized takes root and grows, and with it grows the dehumanization so necessary to the exercise of power.

Power deludes. Even as it decays and rots the superstition remains that power is forever, that those who wield it have a lock on eternity. The powerful see the future as a assent up to heaven when in fact they are on a downward slope. Still they cling to the superstition that they are among the immortals.

The powerful dwell in the sweet euphoria of destruction. In the shadowless world of their fluorescent lighting they plot and plan, they spread their maps upon which they draw the arrows that char power’s spread. They sit before screens and strut their way through power point presentations. They press a button and somewhere a village is reduced to rubble. A nod of the head or a raised eyebrow sends women and children to their graves.

Paranoia spurs power’s growth. It is power’s drug, its stimulant. The fastest gun in the west is always paranoid, tensed and ready for the young buck that will walk through the swinging doors of the saloon, looking to knock him from his perch. (The Swiss have the right idea; be the slowest gun in the west and make a fortune selling pocket knives.)

Dry rot brings power down. So pervasive is its decay that power is unable to sustain itself. It ends up an old man strapped to his wheelchair in the dingy halls of a run-down nursing home, screaming senile obscenities into the air. Rush, Sean and Glenn are power’s prophets. They’ve already checked into the home. They’re saving a wheelchair for power.

Monday, March 29, 2010

Dirty Dancing with the Dispensationalists

I have a thing for farce, chaos and decay. Once the controlled substances saturated my brain, I need a madness against which I can feel normal again.

This is why I find the rapture so attractive. The idea of naked Christians being beamed up to heaven appeals to me. Not that I give a shit about Christians or God, but the thought of being belly to belly with a naked Christian wench while heaven-bound is a powerful argument for conversion. Not that conversion is necessary since the Bible doesn’t say shit about the rapture. Nope! It’s pure invention.

The Rapture is part of a doctrine known as Dispensationalism that was the creation of a 19th Century English clergyman by the name of John Nelson Darby. Darby divided biblical history into a series of “dispensations,” or eras. Each dispensation describes a different manner in which God relates to Man. These dispensations, or eras, were:

• Adam’s fall—The eviction notice
• Adam to Noah—Mankind takes a bath.
• Noah to Abraham—God draws up a contract, in triplicate.
• Abraham to Moses—A real estate deal for all of eternity.
• Moses to Christ—All is forgiven, provided…
• Grace—the contemporary church spreading the Word with rack n’ ruin.

This all climaxed with the grand finale: the Millennial Kingdom that would be ushered in by the Rapture, which would be followed by seven years of Tribulation during which 144,000 Jews would accept Jesus Christ as their personal savior. (As for the others? Let’s not go there.) The tribulation would climax with Christ’s return to establish a thousand-year kingdom on earth.

To many devout Christians, Dispensationalism is the corner stone of our policy in the Middle East. Dispensationalists believe the more fucked-up the Middle East is, the closer history moves towards the Rapture. America’s foreign policy is a dispensationalist’s dream come true. We have the Middle East so screwed up Jesus simply has to start beaming people up.

So, get yourself ready naked Christian wench. Your Belacqua is hot to meet his God in your embrace.

Saturday, March 27, 2010

Our Visionary Quants

Let me tell you about “Quants.” These are people who have done more for America than all the soldiers and marines whose body parts litter the sands of Iraq or the mountains of Afghanistan.. Without the Quants, America would still be a backwater capitalist economy mired in manufacturing and corporate responsibility. The Quants have freed us from this economic tar pit and given us the wings of Icarus with which we are soaring towards the Sun.

Quants are the quantative specialists who reduce reality to raw numbers dancing across a screen, numbers that transcend all that makes life such a hotbed of emotion, chaos and unpredictability.

Quants are convinced that neither death nor life, nor angles nor principalities nor powers, nor things present nor things to come, nor height nor depth, nor all of creation can separate them from the neutered sterility of their numbers and formulae.

They have freed capital from the crude matter of manufactured goods, from the international borders than once held it captive; they have freed capital from society, from community, from all responsibility for those it exploits. Without the Quants, there would be no empire, no imperial wars, and no world dominance. They have replaced long-term vision with shot-term greed.

Their discipline is total; in place of souls, they have tightly wired programs that tolerate neither thought nor emotion. Their numbers are above criticism because they have convinced our corporatist elites that there is no reality outside of the number..

And they are the greatest pranksters the world has ever known because the numbers represent nothing: not gold, not silver not goods—nothing, nada! Theirs is Zen financing in which form is emptiness and emptiness is form.

However, America still awaits the immaculate conception of the ultimate Quant, the enlightened One who can walk on numbers and whose dedication is to total that he is the numbers dancing across a screen.

How will he know this Messiah is among us?

Simple. One day he will leave his Wall Street office and take the train home to his McMansion in Basking Ridge, NJ. When he arrives home, he will give his wife a peck on the cheek and tiptoe into the nursery where his baby sleeps in its crib. He will then murder the infant because he had crunched some numbers at the office and discovered that by killing the child, he has increased his family’s net worth by $1.6 million, given the cost of prestige nursery schools, private day schools, an elite high school, an Ivy League college, not to mention food, clothing, doctor bills and all the other incidental expenses that come with raising a child.

He will be our Savior, our Moses leading us to a Land flowing with debits and credits.

Friday, March 26, 2010

A Litany to Our Technocrats

Let us pause to praise America’s legions of technocrats, their lips stained fecal brown from puckering up each time the god of policy and progress farts. Praise all the accountants, lawyers, programmers, marketers, makers of policy, drafters, Scribes and Pharisees with their fossilized souls frozen in the resin of intellectual barrenness.

These are the bravest of the brave who leave their piety tucked beneath church pews as they go forth on Mondays to execute, promulgate and sell. They drape death in silks, hang bangles around her neck, and drown her stench in perfumes. They are the noble maggots recycling human flesh into upticks and point spreads as they sacrifice children on the altar of intellectual property rights to protect the purity of their patents. They prosecute the innocent in the name of security, level homes in the name of commerce; condone poverty in the name of freedom.

How I bathe in the blinding light of their courage and daring, as they enable the imperial Alzheimer’s that drives our foreign and domestic policy. It is they who make torture a virtue. It is they who unravel our safety net and wind it into skeins of noxious capital that is spun by Wall Street into the shroud that covers the carcass that was once our economy. It is they who man the drones that create the terrorists so necessary for what remains of our prosperity.

May our churches dedicate the first Sunday in Advent to their elevation. Honor and lift them up that God may glorify their efforts. Let every congregation join their voices in A Litany to our Technocrats. Honor them, America. For without them we would be a second-rate power known only for the happiness and security of our people instead of the most feared power the world has ever known. It is they who are taking us to the mountain peak where we may leap forth and soar unto the rocks below.

Thursday, March 25, 2010

Sex

Let’s talk about sex. God knows, everyone else does! There’s sex here, sex there, sex as liberation and sex as decadence. Our obsession with it is downright puritanical. Even the sexual revolution of the sixties was priggish as promiscuity became as obligatory as chastity had been in the fifties. If an individual wasn’t driven by a raging libido, it was considered symptomatic of a deep-seated character disorder. So books and manual abounded, many of them recommending positions guaranteed to slip discs and cause concussions when one partner slipped and dropped the other.

But in all the yammering and all the published reams of paper, one characteristic of sex has remained carefully hidden, and that is its role as an instrument of political propoganda.

As empires grow in power, they become increasingly decadent. Now, note what the brain does when I say, “decadent.” Right away, it pictures a full-blown Roman orgy, with wine-soaked nudes writhing on the floor to the discordant notes of a drunken lyre.

Well, zip up your pants guys. That’s not what I was talking about.

The decadence I am speaking of is an empire’s descent into slaughter and aggression. Decadence is bombing natives and savages into the next world; decadence is allowing children to starve to death (36,000 a day from food-challenged illnesses); decadence is a feral capitalism that spreads poverty and misery and calls it democracy; decadence is torture, black holes, Gitmo and Abu Ghraib.

This presents a problem for the masters of the universe. Were the public to clearly see the full decadence of these activities, the empire would collapse for lack of support. So, what they need is a sacrificial scapegoat that taketh away the sins of the world.

And that’s where sex comes in.

Have you ever noticed that the more authoritarian a regime is, the more puritanical it is? There’s a reason for this. In skillful hands, attacks on sex become the ultimate diversionary acts that redirect the public’s attention away from the decadence necessary to achieve and maintain power. The attacks vary. Gay marriage, teenage pregnancy, promiscuity, celebrity scandal are all held up as examples of the decadence that is weakening the moral fiber of the empire, thus concealing the fact that empire’s lust for power is the real rot that is eating away at it.

Sex is a life force that can bring much beauty into a person’s world, and that is the problem. Those who have known beauty have little tolerance for the ugliness of power. Sex is moist in its fecundity, a damp forest in which sunlight is filtered through the green foliage. Power demands an arid desert where the trees must be felled to allow the sun’s blinding glare to leech the nutrients from the soil.

So it was that Death draped his black cloak around Sex and burned the mark of decadence into her forehead. It all began when men damned Eve for the Fall, and the vagina’s rose became a barbed entrance to fires of Hell.

It continues today as neocons and fundies blame sex for America’s descent into moral decadence in order to direct attention away from the real decadence that is empire itself. The sixties were scary because Sex broke out and threatened to bury Death. I thank God sex is back in the pillory where she belongs.

Wednesday, March 24, 2010

"Fiscal Responsibility"

“Fiscal Responsibility!” How the word tinkles across my teeth, tap dances over my enamels until it kick-steps its way past my lips, to hang in the air, a toxic little gem glistening in the noonday sun of a dying day. What a precious little buzz word being repeated over and over until it bores itself into the public’s psyche like the little shard of the truth it isn’t.

Make no mistake about it, this innocent sounding phrase hides a multitude of sins. To think the poor, deluded public thought “structural adjustments” were something that only happened to Third World countries. Well, Mr. and Mrs. America, welcome to the Third World. The Social Security Trust Fund is opening her legs while giving Wall Street a come-hither look. And Wall Street is hot to come.

But when you stop and think about it, the opportunities embedded in “Fiscal Responsibility” are endless. Here is a golden opportunity to completely reshape the face of America. And rest assured, the corporate subsidiary we call the United States Congress is prepared to do just that.

One area that simply cries out for creative cost cutting is our criminal justice system. The country spends billions of dollars each year in the investigation and prosecution of criminal activity. It is a flawed system, flawed only because it cannot spring into action until a crime has been committed. How stupid is that? The damage has already been done, the victim is robbed or dead, the home broken into, and we have a system that waits until the crime’s been committed before gets off its ass to do something about it. This is not a cost-effective way to do things.

Thank God for Sen. John “He-Should-Have-Been –President” McCain who has introduced the “Enemy Belligerent, Interrogation, Detention and Prosecution Act of 2010” ( S.3081). With the passage of this bill, America will see a substantial cut in the cost of administering our criminal justice system. Why? Because the bill gives the president the power to imprison anyone he wants to. All he has to do is designate them as “terrorist suspects” and it’s off to the slammer. And they can be detained in military custody as long as unspecified hostilities continue. There will be no more waiting around until the crime is committed. Lock ‘em up before they get out of hand, that’s the new order of things.

Think of all the money that will be saved. No costly investigations, no expensive prosecution, no lengthy trials, no perps walking because of a legal technicality. It’s a utopian scheme guaranteed to clear the streets of the low-life scum that have turned America into an urban jungle.

However, criminal justice is not the only area ripe for some creative cost cutting. With the passage of healthcare reform a whole new vista opens before us as American ingenuity rises to meet the challenge. I see a day when the impotent male will be able to conquer his erectile dysfunction for pennies thanks to the Obama ED Kit: two tongue depressors and a roll of duct tape. Fear not, ladies! According to Cosmo, a well-placed splinter can send a woman’s orgasm off the charts. And men! Afterglow takes on a deeper meaning when you go down on your beloved with a flashlight and a pair of tweezers.

Yes, the possibilities are endless as America enters an age of piety, poverty and humility. Here we see the free market at its finest as it leads the American in a race to the bottom where true economic efficiency resides.

Tuesday, March 23, 2010

Postmodern Warfare

This is not a good age for reasonable men. Rather it is an age best understood by a damaged brain, one corroded by the sacred smoke that sees all and understands all through the cracked and distorted lenses that are the gateway to what passes for reality in today’s world.

David Michael Green is such a reasonable man. This is why he expects that objectives, strategies and tactics should govern our Afghan enterprise. Unfortunately, cool, rational analysis is a blind alley leading nowhere.

There was a time, in a golden age long ago, when wars were fought like that. A nation went to war with a well defined objective in mind, be it land, resources or power. Out of this objective, it crafted a strategy that was followed by a specific set of tactics designed to achieve the objective.

Our postmodern warfare, on the other hand, is grounded on one simple premise: dying animals don’t think; they thrash. War is now a series of knee-jerk tactics that yield half-backed strategies designed to implement non-existent objectives.

Postmodern warfare is a mosh pit of head banging, thrashing and body surfing all writh to the warble of a ruptured accordion played by a blind eunuch. It is a nonlinear tangle of contradictory moves and countermoves with neither meaning nor beginning nor end. It is not fought to achieve victory but is fought to perpetuate itself infinitely into the future. This is why it is without objective. An objective could easily be achieved which would threaten our state of perpetual warfare by robbing it of its justification.

It’s not a war on terror; it’s not a “long war.” It’s the Eternal War of the Empty Policy.

Postmodern warfare is a child of habituated conditioning in a world where the brains of our leaders are encapsulated in their testicles and policy is reduced to determining whose is biggest. War is to a dying empire what Viagra is to an old man—a chance to get it off one more time.

Let our infrastructure crumble, our children go to bed hungry, our states sink in a sea of red ink, the homeless wander the streets of our hollowed out cities. None of this matters as long as the Beltway continues astride its militarized ego trip to the approving smiles of its corporate handlers as they continue to siphon public funds into their private pockets.

Green got one thing right when he said, “Yes, as a matter of fact, history’s lesson is correct—empires do die from within, not from external assault. Idiocy is more lethal than Huns.”

Lord Acton was wrong. Power doesn’t corrupt; it rots the brain. That is why we who are brain damaged understand it so well.

Monday, March 22, 2010

Do they hear?

Do they hear me? Do they know I exist? Do they care? The Masters of the Universe, our oligarchs for whom I write, whom I celebrate and praise, the brave leaders leading us into a brave new world. Do my words reach them as they float upward from the bottom of the dung pile that is America?

I am the point man for the future they are visiting on America, the country that is one of the few remaining bubbles of middleclass prosperity they find so objectionable. I am their future wallowing in my Third World shack, dulling my pain with the sacred smoke, reveling in my misery and my hunger, showing America that misery is not the end of the world, that there is a warmth to it once the smoke softens its sharp edges and one no longer cares, no longer strives, and one enters a state of apathetic non-grasping that is the foundation of all spirituality. I am a new age mendicant calling America to a life of spiritual simplicity. Why worry about your health and well being when repose awaits you in the comforting embrace of ennui?

As the sun goes down each day I watch from my hovel as the windows of their houses on the hill glow gray as their screens come to life, as image and sound conceals the grinding rasps of a world beginning to crumble around them while they sit in a self-induced hypnotic trance before the trivia that passes for entertainment and amusement.

As darkness enfolds me I settle down in the foul-smelling rags that are my bedding and dream the big dreams of collapse and decline that give meaning to my life. To know that before long all of those houses sitting on the hill above my hovel will be empty shells in weed-choked yards, their contents that once gave meaning to their lives being rotted away by the rain and cold that breaks through their glassless windows and that the land upon which my hovel sits will, one day, become a city of hovels, one of the many favelas that will spread from coast to coast.

I know this because this is what the sacred smoke tells me. My misery is their misery. They just don’t realize it as yet. They travel their road oblivious and unaware that the life blood being sucked out of them is being drained upward to feed the security/defense machine that will come into play the moment they realize they’re being screwed.

Do my masters hear me? Is there somewhere a Kafkaesque warehouse, its shelves bulging with bundles of paper spilling off endless rows of shelves, musty with the smell of stale files long obscured by the dust of time? Is this where my words end? Buried, filed away, forgotten?

But I forget. There is no more paper. No permanent record. There are only electronic pulses floating in the air, ephemeral and without permanence, tiny dew drops of data that melt beneath the rising sun of our new age. It is all no more.

Sunday, March 21, 2010

dance macabre

The world is a Manichean struggle between Eros and Thanatos. Eros is the wimp-ass god of nurture and sentimentality a cosmic Love Boat, plying the seas of fantasy and treacle. It’s a female thing best kept confined to the hearth and the nursery.

Thanatos, on the other hand, is the stern-faced god of morality, with his call to self-discipline and sacrifice. He is the god of manly death.

We have a choice between living the adrenalin high offered by the slash-and-burn world of Thanatos, or the numbness of love and sentiment that is the legacy of Eros. Thanatos demands orderly ranks; Eros tolerates an unruly rabble. Thanatos is bracing liberation; Eros is stifling boredom.

Our problem is that Thanatos is a little too stern, and sternness is so yesterday. We’ve got to lighten up his image and repackage him to increase his marketability. He needs multiple identities that appeal to all segments of the fragmented demographic we call America.

He will need many costumes to fulfill his multiple roles: the dress-down fashion of the Yuppie, the ragged robes of the mendicant, the torn jeans, funky T-shirts, body piercings and tattoos of the youthful mall rebel. He’ll sport the dark suits of the oligarchs, the designer sweat suits of the soccer mom, the logo loaded jacket of the NASCAR devotee, and, above all, the robes of the preacher.

Let him polish his Mercedes, recharge his cell and ramp up the sound system until the walls quake! Give him games to play, violent videos to wtch, meds to deal with the psychic damage he must endure to thrive.

Let him dance with abandoned gaiety; drive the beat of his dance macabre with the throbbing riff of guitar and drum! Place a Bible in his hand and let him invoke the loving wrath of the redemptive Christ, leading the masses into the yawning jaws of the apocalypse.

It’s the mad dance of death and destruction, sanitized by the rose-colored glasses of the thirty-second spot! It makes the heart sing songs of joyful dirges and lamentations!

But, I am spent. The wine bottle is empty and the last roach has turned to ash. I go now to sleep the manly sleep of the dead.

Saturday, March 20, 2010

Prometheus Revisited

To us on the right of the political spectrum, the world is our Prometheus bound to a rock where our eagle swoops down daily to eat his liver, which then grows back in time for the next day’s feast, the liver, of course, being the raw materials and cheap labor that makes it possible for us to maintain our American Dream.

There is one caveat to this gourmet delight: God has a sick sense of humor. Why else would he have given woman both pain in childbirth and a stronger sex drive than the man (This explains the male obsession with the hard-on and his compulsive need to dominate the female. She is a walking putdown.)

God’s joke on America is that Prometheus’s liver never grows back all the way. Each day it is a little smaller than the day before, which is why the eagle is slowly wasting away. God has also blinded the eagle’s handlers. In their hubris they believe the eagle is as strong as ever.

But the eagle is nearing God’s punch line in which it will expend two units of energy just to acquire a single unit of sustenance. Even then, the handlers will remain clueless and will believe that the solution to the weakened eagle is to move on to another organ, not realizing that God has placed an angel with a flaming sword between them and the other organs. That’s what getting kicked out of Eden meant.

Apparently eating from the tree of knowledge taught us nothing.

Friday, March 19, 2010

Leading the Lambs

Truth is inimical to good governance. Were governments to tell the truth, there would be no wars. Without wars, there would be no defense contracts. Without defense contracts, the upward flow of capital would be crippled. Governance is the methodology whereby the peak of the pyramid leads its base into barren pastures the peak markets as the Elysian Fields of paradise.

Actually, governments don’t lie, they simply create alternative truths. One of the fundamental truths they have created is the one that posits that we need a engorged military establishment to rampage across the earth creating enough enemies to justify its existence so money can be sucked out of domestic social programs thus justifying their elimination or reduction.

This upward flow of capital is justified in the name of “fiscal responsibility.” As one writer put it, “[I]t appears to be a code word for delivering public monies into private hands and raising taxes on the already-squeezed middle class. In the parlance of the International Monetary Fund (IMF), these are called ‘austerity measures,’ and they are the sorts of this that people are taking to the streets in Greece, Iceland and Latvia to protest. Americans are not taking to the streets only because nobody has told us that is what is being planned.”

Of course they haven’t! And they don’t plan to. Instead, they will execute a Goebbels and repeat “fiscal responsibility” over and over until it is accepted as an absolute truth to which There Is No Alternative (TINA). This is why Obama is the right man in the right place at the right time. He’s so sincere in his prevarications.

So it is that the Pentagon will continue to produce enemies that will call for more money to fight out current enemies while new ones are created, and the flag will be waved and the American people will be called upon to sacrifice so our oligarchs may make the world safe for corporatism while they slash domestic spending so the homeland might prosper.

But not to worry about the drones becoming unruly. Our oligarchs are prepared to spend billions in a public relations campaign to convince the unwashed public that the two-by-four being shoved up its ass is really Liberty’s Torch.

Wednesday, March 17, 2010

Blowing Bubbles and Smoke While Saving Social Security

Where Jesus walked on water, our economy walks on bubbles. This shows that both God and greed generate miracles.

Our current meltdown in nothing more than an economy transitioning between bubbles. As long as the Fed’s printing presses work overtime, we will have enough liquidity to inflate the next bubble that comes down the pike. The credit crunch simply shows that fear is the only emotion that can trump greed. But, fear has weak legs for as soon as the next bubble begins to rise in the east like the Star of Bethlehem, greed will return and send fear packing.

It is axiomatic that the more liquidity that is available, the more a bubble can be pumped up. Liquidity is to a bubble what steroids are to professional sports.

Our oligarchs have been circling a sea of liquidity like vultures circling a rotting carcass. I am speaking, or course, of the Social Security Trust Fund. The billions of dollars that sit in that fund that would better serve America if Wall Street were allowed to burn it in its Furnace of Financial Fantasy.

They have found that a direct frontal assault on the fund won’t work. You’ve got too many senior citizens out there who have turned into dependent leeches that are depriving Wall Street of its liquidity fix.

This means we need a long-term approach that will finance future bubbles after the next generation of bubbles pop.

The solution to this problem is simple: reposition smoking.

Let Obama begin the campaign with a major policy speech before the American Medical Association. Let him reaffirm his commitment to a healthy American public, and announce a major administration initiative to combat the ravages of smoking. The first shot fired in this campaign will be the convening of a blue ribbon panel of scientists who will be charged with the mission of determing exactly why cigarettes cause the health problems they do. (Load the panel with those scientists who deny evolution and global warming.)

Six months later, they issue a report that says, in essence, “Silly us! All this time we thought tobacco was the problem. Now it turns out that the real problem is the cigarette paper, which contains a major carcinogenic, and we’ve figured out how to eliminate it. We have also discovered, much to our surprise, that tobacco is a health benefit. After all, tobacco is an herb and everyone knows that herbs are good for you. But there’s more! We’ve also discovered that you maximize tobacco’s health benefits if smoking is started before the onset of puberty.”

Then the administration moves to step two, a major campaign whose slogan is, “A Butt Can in Every Classroom.” We’ve got to get those little tykes puffing away. Elementary school smoking must become the wave of the future.

The goal is simple: once we get the average life expectancy down to 52.3 years, Wall Street owns the Trust Fund and can generate so many bubbles that the NYSE will look like the old Laurence Welk Show.

Tuesday, March 16, 2010

Damn!

Sorry about the lack of activity, but we lost power during Saturday's n'oreaster and didn't l;get it back until this afternoon.

Belacqua will be back tomorrow.

cw

Saturday, March 13, 2010

"Piss Christ"

It takes a delicate touch to keep God from becoming problematic. The truth is that God is an amalgam of Eros and Thanatos, which melt together to give life the creative force that is anathema to the corporate state. God can only be brought into politics if we emphasize Thanatos and force Eros into the background where it will hopefully wither and die. This is why the theocratic right has corrupted the pro-life movement by unleashing a rage that shoots doctors and bombs abortion clinics instead of affirming a compassionate ethic of life and empathy. Violence is more easily exploited than compassion; the negative attracts more attention than the positive.

Here is an an example of how we serve God by destroying Him. In 1989, the photographer/artist Andres Serrano put on display a photograph titled Piss Christ. It showed a crucifix suspended in a gallon container of the artist’s urine.

The religious right went bonkers. They had to attack the work because Serrano had done nothing less than produce a deeply profound work of religious art that opened up to the viewers a deeper understanding of the wholeness and unity of God’s creation. The religious right couldn’t allow this to happen. Here was Eros trying to kick the door down. They had to barricade it.

Piss is a victim of bad press. We hide it in our toilets and pretend it doesn’t exist by never mentioning it in polite society. And this is as it must be, for the truth of the matter is that piss is a life-sustaining fluid. Piss nurtures life by flushing toxins out of our system. It is an integral part of God’s creation.

And this was the problem with Serrano’s Piss Christ. The crucifix was suspended in a life-sustaining fluid. The last thing the right wanted was a public popping a bunch of epiphanies in which they saw the all-embracing nature of God’s creation in which even the ugly and despised are as important to life as the beautiful and the sublime. For in piss, Thanatos and Eros are a unified whole.

The religious right’s strength is the belief that God’s creation is selective. The belief that it is all embracing is a heresy that must be suppressed. As always, God rides into politics on the Devil’s back.

Friday, March 12, 2010

God Bless Them Texans!

Hear this! Texas is the wave of the future as the future is flushed down the crapper. A wag once said that if you talk to God, you’re praying; if God talks to you, you’re schizophrenic. That’s wrong! If God talks to you, you’re Texan.

And God’s been talking Texas’s ear off. We know this because, according to The New York Times the Texas board of education is bringing God back into the classroom. Yessir! They’re sick and tired of all those postmodern, deconstructionist, latte-sucking, abortion-loving, and undoubtedly gay, revisionist historians who have frozen him out of American history.

And they’re even madder over how the Republican Party, God’s party, has been left on the cutting room floor. Hell, everyone who counts knows our forefathers were all card-carrying Republicans who never left home with out their bibles. When Jefferson wrote “All men are created equal…”, the “man” he was talking about was a pious Christian, Republican landowner. None others need apply.

Listen to what those good Christians want to do to:

--Set things straight about the civil rights movement, pointing out that the movement created “unrealistic expectations of equal outcomes.”

--Include Phyllis Schlafly as a heroine of the conservative resurgence of the 1980s.

--Eliminate any “reference to race, sex or religion in talking about how different groups have contributed to the national identity.”

-- Ralph Nader and Ross Perot are to be dumped down the memory hole.

--Stonewall Jackson will be celebrated as a leadership role model.

--Stop calling it imperialism and start calling it expansionism, also known as bringing Jesus to the world.

Brings tears to your eyes, doesn’t it.

If the board approves the proposed guidelines, the perfume of a conservative fart could well spread over the land because Texas is the biggest buyer of textbooks in the country, so the revised history book Texas wants could end up in every classroom in America since it would cut into publishers’ bottom line to publish one set of textbooks for Texas and another set for the heathens.

And that’s fine with me! God gave us the goddamn country, so it’s only right that he should take center stage in our school textbooks. I mean, how in the hell can you run an efficient multinational without God’s terrible swift sword clearing the way for you. America would not be the military powerhouse it is today were it not for God blessing us with the finest military weapons money can buy.

Who else but God is sucking all the money to the top of the pyramid where he showers it on His chosen ones? Wealth is a sign that God is pleased with you; poverty is a sign that he’s pissed. Let us now praise the chosen by giving them centers stage in our nation’s history books.

For too long a White, male-dominated Protestant church has been marginalized. It’s high time Jesus took up the American flag and led us all into a golden age of theocratic oppression. We’ll be all the happier for it.

Thursday, March 11, 2010

Tripping with Dickens

I love reading Dickens when I’m stoned. His twisted plotting and syntax dances in mad harmony with the convoluted spasms of my brain on its winnowing journey through the cosmos. I lose myself in each of his tightly wrought characters and hold prolonged conversations with them over multiple tankards of stout in Victorian pubs. (Scrooge was so misunderstood! His values were the values that made Great Britain a capitalist powerhouse. It wasn’t the ghosts that transformed him; he’d simply OD’d on laudanum to cure his Christmas Eve cold. He later regretted his excesses of generosity.)

But, I digress.

Do you know why modern literature is so sterile? It is the lack of hardship. Prosperity is downright boring; too much of it leads to a paralyzing self-absorption that lacks the cloying sentimentality that is the warp and weft of great literature. When was the last time a Dickens appeared on the literary scene?

And let’s be honest; suffering cloys. Who has not been moved to tears by the long, drawn-out, interminable death of Jo the street-crossing sweeper in Dickens’s Bleak House, that unlettered, unwashed, unfed waif who knew “nothink?” Comforted by the noble surgeon, Alan Woodcourt who could do nothing for the kid except walk him through the Lord’s Prayer, Jo’s voice grows weaker and weaker as he repeats each line of the prayer until he finally gasps out, “Hallowed be thy…” and croaks. He was but one of the ragged and hungry waifs that peppered so much of Victorian literature.

My God! If the poor prosper, whom shall we pity? What is there to write about if you have a nation that is fed and clothed? Authors are reduced to writing about anxiety, unhappy relationships, and life’s nihilistic boredom. And life is boring if you don’t have to grub for food and shelter.

Thank God our oligarchs are changing that. They are marching us back to that golden age of filthy slums, unchecked crime, homeless children and twelve-year-old whores, back to that time when the civilized cruelty of Social Darwinism reigned supreme.

Soon, our authors will pen saccharine tomes of struggle widows and hungry children, their pale, drawn faces pressed against the windows of the privileged, a tear running down their besmirched cheeks as they watch the gaiety and wealth that will be forever beyond their reach.

There is no sentimentality without suffering. And our leaders are supplying ample suffering for which the authors, literary agents and publishing houses of America thank them. They and they alone, are bringing great literature back to the Euromerican world.

Wednesday, March 10, 2010

The Sanity of Madness

Madness is so misunderstood. What appears to be self-destructive, erratic, contradictory, antisocial or even criminal on the surface isn’t always. At a superficial level, madness is, indeed, madness, and this is what you commonly find on an individual level.

However, if untreated, madness grows and condenses; it becomes more and more compressed and internalized until it is a black pellet that embeds itself in the soul. It is then that personal madness transitions into institutional madness in which the insane organize and create corporations and governments and take on all of the characteristics associated with sanity so their madness is barely noticed, and all of their actions, no matter how insane or destructive or antisocial or contradictory or even criminal are treated as normal.

This is the insanity the public is unable to comprehend because it is so nuanced. There are no madmen talking to themselves or standing on a street corner raving and ranting incoherently. Rather institutional madness speaks in measured tones, it justifies itself with policies or with arcane mathematical formulas. It smiles and reassures; it speaks in soaring rhetoric or marshals facts and data and numbers to explain why its madness isn’t madness but is a sublime expression of sanity. The most striking characteristic of institutional madness is that it always claims that either God, destiny, or history is on its side.

It is a madness best understood by CEOs and stoners, both of whom are arrested adolescents. (Though I must admit that the introduction of Viagra could easily upset everything. You see effective corporate and government leadership traditionally gets its nastiness from hormonal displacement. This is a phenomenon in which the erection passes from the pecker to the soul. As a man’s prowess wanes he figures that if he can’t fuck a chick, he’ll fuck a country. However, if he can continue to fuck a chick will he be as eager to fuck a country? The jury’s still out on that one. The only hope is that greed will trump libido and the public will continue to be reamed.)

But, I digress…

What’s appears self destructive on the surface isn’t. For it is only by plumbing the depths of madness that its sanity becomes clear. The mad aren’t mad when the public thinks their sane.

Let me give you an example of this. Boeing is trying its damndest to build a giant cargo plane, the C-17. The planes cost a cool $330 million each and the program has sucked $65 billion out of the public treasury. Congress, in its wisdom, budgeted an additional $2.5 billion for the program that the Pentagon never even asked for. That’s to buy ten more planes the military doesn’t even want. However that means nothing. Boeing wants them. And we know whose pulling the strings in Congress. (The bleeding hearts complain that that $2.5 billion could provide 141,681 children and adults with free health care for a year. Right! They want us to compromise our national security for a healthy public. Won’t happen!)

This money is being thrown at Boeing at a time when the country’s states and municipalities are facing economic hard time. Forty-eight states are facing budget gaps of $180 billion and were forced to cut their 2010 budgets by 28%, and Congress is throwing $2.5 billion at an unwanted white elephant. And let’s not forget that the Pentagon is shelling out $400 a gallon for all the gasoline needed to keep the tires and treads of its Afghan enterprise rolling.

Mad isn’t it? Maybe on the surface it is; but plumb its depths and you find a serene sanity at work. You see, according to Ray Scheppach, executive director of the National Governors Association, the states are in such desperate straits that they may have to sell off their roads and physical plants to private investors.

Can anyone spell S-H-O-C-K D-O-C-T-R-I-N-E? Traditionally we the shock doctrine as a situation in which a gaggle of feral corporatists descend on a country after it has experienced some sort of natural disaster and exploit the shit out of it while its citizens are dazed and confused.

However, here we have a much more sophisticated version of it. Instead of a natural disaster, we have a pair giant vacuums cleaner installed in the Beltway and on Wall Street. For decades these machines have been sucking revenue out of the states while demanding fiscal responsibility and balanced budgets from them, even as Washington plunges itself into a state of indebted penury. Now our corporations face the prospect of being able to pick up state-owned assets for pennies on the dollar. It’s called privatization on steroids.

Yes, it’s madness, but it’s madness that is perfect sanity for our corporatists whose only concern is to beef up the bottom line. Were corporations truly people they would have been institutionalized long ago. But because they aren’t people they are normal because institutions, our leaders assure us, can never go crazy.

Tuesday, March 9, 2010

Me and Larry

Larry Summers and I are tight. I mean we’re tighter than a fox butt-fucking a gnat. Not that I know the guy; never seen him and wouldn’t know it if we passed on the street. What I mean is that he and I have an ideological lip lock that can’t be broken. Somewhere in an alternate universe our brains merged and became one thrombulating organ oozing the black bile of creative thought. The only difference between the two of us is that he gets paid for shoveling his bullshit and I don’t.

Here is an example of Larry’s poetry, written when he was with the World Bank:

Just between you and me, shouldn’t the World Bank be encouraging MORE migration of the dirty industries to the LDCs [Less Developed Countries}?”

This is Larry at this best. His reasoning is impeccable. The way he sees it, poor people value economic harm less than rich people. Look at it this way: a dust mote on a dung heap is barely noticed; a dust mote on the highly-polished lens of a telescope screams for attention. Why should a poor country with its open sewage ditches, filthy streets, rampant diseases, garbage rotting beneath the tropical sun and factories relocated to escape the environmental regulations and labor costs of the developed countries care about another dollop of pollution?

Gated communities keep the riff-raff out, and it’s no different with rich countries. Turds don’t rise, they drop.

Larry’s brilliance is his ability to quantify misery and in doing so sanitize it and make it acceptable to polite society. In Europe it costs a corporation $1,000 a ton to dump its crap. In Somalia, the same ton of shit costs $2.50 to dump.

Do the math.

The nice thing about number is they never bleed, never get sick and never die. They look so sweet as they dance across a screen or arrange themselves in neat columns on a spreadsheet. (Spreadsheets are always printed on thick paper so the blood of the victims can’t soak through.)

But, let me tell you the real reason I love Larry. The man is a with-it anachronism, a relic of an age passing into oblivion. He is the product of an era so awash in a sea of funny money that it was possible to float any ideology, no matter how absurd, such as the divinity of “The Invisible Hand.” Well, the sea is drained and no more, but Larry is still rowing away on the seabed to a cadence called by his coxswain Tim.

I thrive on delusion. It is my bread and butter, my raisons d’ĂȘtre. Like Larry, I would crumble if I ever came face to face with reality. Reality is for chumps and progressives. Give me my daily fix of make believe and I’m good to go. Hell, the only way to watch CNN is stoned! Then you can really trip out on fantasy.

In the meantime, I will continue to think as Larry thinks; I will continue to make things up as Larry does, and I will wallow in the orgiastic world of abstract make believe where numbers say it all even if they have nothing to do with real life. If they did it would be too real. And, as Larry well knows, we can’t have that.

Monday, March 8, 2010

I'm back!

God how I love it, fucking love it! Sucking on the sacred smoke, careening around the cosmos, banking off planets, dodging asteroids, weaving in and out meteor showers, and best of all sitting down with the Lord God Almighty for a couple of hands of Texas hold ‘em (His kid’s still pissed over how Christians ignore his teachings. He preached revolution and the Romans hung him out to dry only to see his teachings trivialized and reduced to a doctrine of personal salvation, a sort of a theological cover-your-ass. It was Paul’s fault. He was given a mission to destroy Christianity, and he did by convincing the world that the kid died for our sins. Bullshit! The kid died ‘cause he pissed off the Romans. I’m telling you, it’s going to be a rock ‘n roll Judgment Day when the kid comes back!)

But in the meantime, I’m back! When GWB left office I sank into a deep pit of drug-induced despair. I pumped shit into my system that wasn’t meant to be pumped into a septic tank, let alone a human body. I was crushed, destroyed, a mere empty husk of a man. Then, one day, when God had cleaned out all my chips, I had an unwanted moment of lucidity and I saw….

George had risen from the dead in the person of Barack Obama (Same shit; different package.) Sure, it was so much better with George bumbling around. You kept waiting for him to fuck up so Karl could bail him out. The last thing this country needs is an articulate and intelligent Trilby. It’s true, that Obama has his Svengali in Rahm Emanuel, but I wonder if Rahm has him on as short a leash as George was on. There’s always a danger that Obama could turn on his handlers, something that was never a worry with George.

O, but life is sweet now, especially since America’s toxic Pillsbury Doughboy, Karl Rove has published his memoirs. Once again Karl proves that bullshit ain’t bullshit if he says it ain’t bullshit! Did GWB lie us into war? Hell no!, Karl tells us. Had they but known that Sadddam had no WMDs, they wouldn’t have set foot on the country. Nossir! Not a goddamn foot.

So what if the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) said there were no WMDs. So What if our intelligence agencies said there were no WMDs. What do those people know? God told George the weapons were there, and that was the end of it. The fact that none were found means nothing. When God speaks it’s right even if it’s wrong. (At least, that’s what He tells me.)

Besides, Karl’s claim is another example of his superb soft-shoe. His assertion that we never would have invaded had we only known there were no WMDs elides over the fact that WMDs had nothing to do with the invasion. Hell, we were after the oil, even though we never got any, but who cares since the war enriched a lot of contractors and desensitized the American public to blasted babies and bombed out villages. Thanks to embedded TV news crews war became a just another video game.

I do hope the Tea Party picks Karl up, and that he finds another Trilby he can play Svengali to. Could Sarah be the one? Is it possible Karl could once again move into the Oval Office? I can only hope.

But what really gets my follicles a twittering is the hapless Democrats. What bunch of losers. My plunge into despair was triggered by the fact that not only did the Democrats control the White House, but they had a filibuster-proof majority in Congress. In my paranoia I saw four years of Democratic payback for all the abuse the party had suffered since Ronnie’s ascension.

What a crock! I forgot that the Democrats are suffering from a terminal case of battered-wife syndrome and are a study in learned helplessness. The Democrats are like the guy who worked for a sadistic boss. Every morning, as soon as the guy stepped into the workplace, his boss would whack him with a two-by-four. Morning after morning, as sure as the sun comes up in the east, the boss was there. One morning, the guy stepped through the door, and the boss wasn’t there. So the guy waited for him.

Yes, nothing’s changed in the last year, except Progressives are sitting around scratching their asses while they wait for Obama to turn left. Ain’t going to happen! Obama roared past that intersection the moment he was sworn in.

God, how I love it!