The first idea I had to title this post was “Tits”. Here is the reason: it hearkens to some dialogue in the move “Tenacious D”. Jack Black asks his partner: “What’s it going to be, Kyle, tits or destiny?” Kyle whispers back “tits”.
The American people chose tits last night. It’s actually not a funny thing, although it helped me adding that example. What happened yesterday is a large chunk of America chose not to grow, to perpetuate their childhood. The grandparents who voted for Obama effectively fucked their grandchildren. It was an astonishing display of selfishness and willed ignorance.
I am going to start calling these people the “headless people”, the ones who said their incantation and CHOSE to be decapitated, who CHOSE to let someone else do their thinking for them. It’s like the tension built up and up between the image of Obama as a dangerous radical who was bankrupting America, and the experience of their lives, which is that most people are nice, most things work, and we have had no major economic disasters for over 75 years. Confronted with this dichotomy, what did they choose? What was EASY.
This is the true problem we face. Being idealistic, I truly thought that if I spent the time building clearly argued, closely reasoned, factually accurate treatments of our problems, that that would matter somewhat, when combined with all the other things Glen Beck, and Matt Kibbe, and Ron and Rand Paul, and Rush Limbaugh and others are and have been doing. I thought that what we lacked was information.
But our true lack is moral courage, and emotional strength. That was not a political vote yesterday, but a CULTURAL one, one that indicated clearly that Americans lack the balls to look at and deal honestly with our problems.
To my mind, the conclusion is clear that until we reach crisis stage, nothing will be done.
Here, though, is a reassuring thought (perhaps): Mitt Romney showed no sign of dealing with our deficit issue seriously either, and had he been elected, he still would have been blamed for it. This way, it is squarely on the Democrats.
As far as the House, I would say this: they are going to be blamed for being partisan whether they are or not. It doesn’t matter. Obama’s version of “bipartisanship” is calling you hyperpartisan if you do anything but what he wants. Given that, fuck Obama. Drag every heel in the place. You may as well do something to deserve blame, since you’ll get it either way.
And ARREST ERIC HOLDER. What do you have to lose? The asshole deserves it richly, and it is within the legal purview of the House. He and Obama both told them to fuck off. Why not return the favor?
As far as my previous post, and black magic: I don’t know if I meant that or not, but SOMETHING weird is happening. Three times in Obama’s Presidency, he has been on the verge of confronting a sea change, and had media attention distracted long enough to avert it as a result of a natural disaster.
Support had been waning for Obamacare–and was much broadcast in the media–when the Haiti earthquake hit.
Scott Walker had just signed the bill prohibiting public sector unions in Wisconsin, generating national attention, when the Japan Earthquake hit.
And of course Obama was clearly ebbing when Hurricane Sandy hit. I had actually, unseriously, wondered in the back of my head if something like that would happen. He’s a fool, but Chris Matthews among others felt the storm helped Obama.
So you have this energy shifting, moving. You have a momentum in one direction, then you have a tidal event, and everything switches back. Strange. That is why I proposed, in the spirit of saying whatever the hell I like whether it makes sense or not, that perhaps the HAARP had something to do with it. Causing earthquakes is a non-obvious use for it, but it was DESIGNED to affect high altitude weather (and presumably as a prototype ballistic missile shield).
Now, this is crazy paranoid, I know. Black helicopter stuff. Got it. Here is an even weirder idea: what if there is an energy backing him that is causing these things? Yes, I just lost the materialists (but how do you put up with my shit anyway?), but it’s a thought worth putting out there. SOMETHING happened. I can’t explain it.
I don’t think the polls were rigged, but I have wondered who does the exit polls. If you have electronic voting booths, the only real protection against their being programmed to react in desired ways is the Exit Polls, which offer a sort of quick reality check against vote tallies. But who does that? Is it a private firm? Do Fox and CNN do their own? Can we assume the talliers are incorruptible? I would say not. Wall Street had hundreds of billions to throw around. That is serious money.
Finally, I wanted to say that what won yesterday was hate. People would rather hate large corporations, than work to build a better society. You can’t have both. It is a dominant emotional tone, and it affects thinking. Ironically, voting for Obama IS voting for large corporations, but here is the thing: the headless people don’t want to hear that. They have a simple worldview: all good things rest with them and their tribe, and all bad things are outside it. They get to be super mellow, super friendly, super open with their tribe, because all their HATE they can direct outside. They can justify it by defining their ideological Others as IN PRINCIPLE, AT ROOT evil, which of course is the root emotion of racism, nationalism, and every other socially expressed bigotry. But they don’t see that, since they are nice INSIDE the tribe.
And what one sees–what I see, daily–is that they use the SAME WORDS to demonize conservatives that we use to DESCRIBE them. Take that word “tribal”. I have used it often, and got it from Friedrich Hayek. I saw it, looked at the discursive patterns of left wingers, and said “damn, that’s accurate”.
But today on NPR they had a guy who wrote a book on how the Republican Party has been taken over by the radical right and–you guessed it–tribalism. We see them accuse us of being fact-averse, or invariably overwhelmed when apparently valid claimed are contextualized. I have seen, often, the EXACT WORDS I have used to describe the thought patterns of people I have been debating used against me, inaccurately.
Words do not mean anything, once you’ve been through the decapitation ceremony. They are simply signifiers indicating friend or foe. They are code words saying either attack or don’t attack.
I have said this approximately, but will try to say this more clearly: in my view Sybaritic Leftism exists in a continuum with Cultural Sadeism. The first drifts into the second. That, in my view, is a predominant reason why the Horror genre is so popular now. What happens is that you want comfort. You don’t want hard thoughts. You don’t want anyone to remind you of how bad things have gotten in various parts of the world even in the last ten years.
So you start lying to yourself. You start pretending that all the problems of the world could be solved, IF ONLY people were not standing in the way. And you have this very benign self image. You do Yoga and Pilates. You are a vegetarian. And of course you vote Democrat, because you care about women, and women’s issues. Frustration gnaws at you. Why can’t everyone see that all these things have simple solutions that cause no one anywhere any pain or difficulty? Why can’t they see how easy life could and should be if the government just took care of everything?
And I think there is a break point where you lose touch with reality. That is the moment you are decapitated. That is the moment that words lose their constant and intrinsic meaning. As I have said often, you become a leftist the moment you no longer care about outcomes. And you become a Cultural Sadeist the moment you care more about hate than love, more about power than truth.
Large segments of our electorate just went through that process. The dream I had was perhaps prophetic in some ways.
Finally, finally (I think I said it once already) I would submit that for those who are very upset: I get it. It’s OK. But at the end of the day, we live in a very comfortable nation. Our police are largely still honest. Most of the good things in life, we still have. The questions I would ask are simple: are you still telling the truth? Then don’t stop. Is what you are working for still worth it? Then don’t stop. Just be realistic and understand that many Americans don’t want to hear you . We have, of course, a huge problem with an effective propaganda system developed by the Left. But the raw data is out there. Anyone who wants to learn, can.
Therefore I would submit that our battle is cultural, and that realistically we need to be thinking of options when the shit hits the fan, which it will, sooner or later. My financial plan is a good one, I believe, and as time permits I will be fleshing it out.
Much of this is beyond our control, though, and I feel events are just going to have to play themselves out. There are times to be outraged, times to cry, and times to wait, and not be tired by waiting. Or, being lied about, not give way to lying.
Hell: here’s the whole thing. May it be a tonic. I look at it daily.
IF you can keep your head when all about you
Are losing theirs and blaming it on you,
If you can trust yourself when all men doubt you,
But make allowance for their doubting too;
If you can wait and not be tired by waiting,
Or being lied about, don’t deal in lies,
Or being hated, don’t give way to hating,
And yet don’t look too good, nor talk too wise:
If you can dream – and not make dreams your master;
If you can think – and not make thoughts your aim;
If you can meet with Triumph and Disaster
And treat those two impostors just the same;
If you can bear to hear the truth you’ve spoken
Twisted by knaves to make a trap for fools,
Or watch the things you gave your life to, broken,
And stoop and build ’em up with worn-out tools:
If you can make one heap of all your winnings
And risk it on one turn of pitch-and-toss,
And lose, and start again at your beginnings
And never breathe a word about your loss;
If you can force your heart and nerve and sinew
To serve your turn long after they are gone,
And so hold on when there is nothing in you
Except the Will which says to them: ‘Hold on!’
If you can talk with crowds and keep your virtue,
‘ Or walk with Kings – nor lose the common touch,
if neither foes nor loving friends can hurt you,
If all men count with you, but none too much;
If you can fill the unforgiving minute
With sixty seconds’ worth of distance run,
Yours is the Earth and everything that’s in it,
And – which is more – you’ll be a Man, my son!
Finally to the third power: I think of Churchill, and how he must have felt watching Adolf Hitler come to power, knowing full well that a PREVENTABLE disaster was in the making, and being ignored. Tens of millions of people died because of the failure of the Western European powers to bring Hitler to heel early on.
I don’t know what we face, but it can scarcely be much worse than a global war. Whatever it is, we can face it with courage and faith. The rest is out of our hands, and I think sometimes accepting that fact is the path of wisdom, and the peace of mind that comes with it.