I have been up and I have been down. I have run major TV shows & made feature films and thought for sure I would never work again. I have stared into the abyss and walked away better for it.
If there's one thing I have learned from the experience, it's this: Bullshit is killing us all.
We live in Indecent Times. Decency is as dead as irony is alive.
In American Politics, Decency died the day Lee Atwater went to work.
WASHINGTON, DC – MARCH 21: Paul Manafort, Roger Stone and Lee Atwater, young Republicans political operatives who have set up lobbying firms. (Photo by Harry Naltchayan/The Washington Post via Getty Images)
Lee Atwater’s the dude on the right — keeping company with Paul Manafort & Roger Stone. During the 1980’s & 1990’s, Atwater ran campaigns for Ronald Reagan & George Bush before running the RNC. Atwater didn’t invent dirty, malicious politics in America but he turned them from gamesmanship into brinkmanship. He had no interest in compromise. None.
Newt Gingrich picked up the mantle when cancer took a bite out of Atwater (though I bet cancer wished almost immediately it could spit Atwater out).
Newt turned Atwater’s political war against the Left into an all out Culture War. We have not been the same since.
When you choose not to compromise with someone, you cease having to communicate with them — except to tell them what you expect to DO to them. It’s an aggressive act — cutting off effective communication with someone. It’s a not-so-subtle declaration of War. Culture War. Political War.
It flows: When you see yourself in a perpetual state of war, the people opposing you are your enemy — even if they’re your countrymen and they simply see a different way of solving the Nation’s many problems. Decent people don’t see people they disagree with as their enemy deserving of cultural death.
But Newt did. As did Lee.
Paul Manafort and Roger Stone — friends of Lee’s — went to work for Donald J Trump. We all know where he stands vis a vis ‘decency’.
Another of Donald Trump’s mentors of course was Roy Cohn — another member of this despicable club.
And Roy Cohn famously worked for Joe McCarthy. And Joe McCarthy famously got asked the very same question Donald Trump and the whole Republican Party need to be peppered with repeatedly: “At last, sir, have you no DECENCY?”
There’s a phrase I’m fond of saying here: “BACK IT UP OR IT’S BULLSHIT”.
I appreciate that it’s just easier to let other people think for you — especially where the Bigger Questions In Life are concerned. Where did ‘This’ all come from? Why are we here? What is the point?
‘Cos god’ is what Institutional Religion wants you to buy — and they hit you early and hard to make you buy. And, because they’re hitting you early, when you’re a kid, they know you have no capacity to fight back. Or ask a good question or two. Something that might stump them like: “What the hell are you TALKING about?”
Enter the ‘Mumbo Jumbo’… the ‘Ooga Booga’… The MAGICAL THINKING.
What happens when we die? Heaven. Proof of it’s existence? Don’t need proof — faith. Ah — and ‘faith’ in WHAT?
Faith in the Magic. Faith that ‘The Magic’ is real. Based on… nothing. Because there never was anything to back it up.
For a generation now — since Lee Atwater & Newt Gingrich & Karl Rove & everyone who ever worked in the Nixon White House declared open cultural war on Progressive America (AMERICA in other words), actual data to back up and justify their policy initiatives and the direction they wanted to take America were totally non-existent. But MAGICAL THINKING was suddenly available in abundance.
Liberated from having to actually BACK UP their claims, republicans and conservatives went hog wild — trickling down all kinds of bullshit on the heads of the American People. Bullshit is like a booby trapped toy dropped into a war zone. It looks so innocent when you pick it up — and then it ‘explodes’ inside your head. Coat the Truth in enough lies often enough and the lie begins to cover up the Truth completely.
The story of how marijuana was ‘illegalized’ in this country comes to mind. And while I’m at it, let me do a little cross pollenization —
Inevitably, Magical Thinkers legislate their Magical Thinking onto the rest of us. We find ourselves subjected to laws and rules that WE KNOW are based on bullshit. And we look around at each other and we wonder — how the hell did THE MAJORITY of Americans end up HERE — where BULLSHIT (Magical Thinking) gets taken seriously while The Truth gets tossed aside?
Bullshit — and those who deal in it — count on their bullshit causing confusion and disrupting logic.
Donald J Trump comes to mind, strangely…
Good thing the cure isn’t hard to find or take: Read. Learn. Analyze. Question. Back It Up.
Remember this guy? The Crypt Keeper? Friend of mine actually. For real. He used to say “Be careful what you wish for, kiddies, you may just get it!” Then the Crypt Keeper would laugh — kinda like this —
And then he’d get on with the episode.
Now, of course, when the Crypt Keeper warned that you’d ‘get’ it, he didn’t mean that you’d ‘receive the thing you wanted’. He meant, ironically, the opposite. You’d ‘GET IT’ and wish like hell you hadn’t.
That’s how republicans would feel — in a very short amount of time — about The World they have been trying to foist upon the rest of us: “Wait — we didn’t realize THIS would happen if we had our way — send it back to the kitchen! Is it too late to order something else off the menu?”
American conservatives — if we take them at their word — want to CONSERVE a world where:
The Rich Get Richer
Everyone else gets poorer
A dwindling Social Safety Net (to pay for the rich guys)
White Christian Male Cultural Hegemony rules
Abortion is illegal & so is Birth Control
All non-European immigration is illegal
The Free Press is not Free
Guns are even MORE ubiquitous than they are already
Anyone who isn’t Straight, white, Christian & male is automatically suspicious.
Might makes Right
Ignorance is bliss
A lot of conservatives want to bring religion (theirs) back to a Central position it really never had in American Life — except in Currier & Ives prints.
A lot of conservatives want to restrict education to ‘special white people’ only. Everyone else is going to work the gig economy while their faltering, compromised standard of living gets harder and harder to maintain.
A lot of conservatives think guns should be everywhere. Literally EVERYWHERE (except republican party events).
American Conservatives now think conspiring with a hostile foreign power is no different than cleaning hand and finger prints off a gun you just used to murder someone. No prints, no crime.
Uh huh. Let’s see if Mr Mueller goes along with that…
If one could really pull off ‘Thought Experiments’, I would LOVE to give Conservatives the world they crave.
First, of course (because it’s a thought experiment), we’d put all the Conservatives in one part of the country (one that’s already hard core red) and — irony — PUT A WALL AROUND IT.
Then we, the progressive world, would go do our thing for, say, A GENERATION while our conservative chums did the same thing inside their world. Then, at a certain pre-determined time and place, we’d all get together and COMPARE NOTES. Question: How would Conservative World have done in contrast to Progressive World?
If we realistically laid out Each World’s approach to education, to diversity, to health care, to birth control & abortion, to financing the commonweal itself, we would find very distinct countries: One — Conservative Land — would be lots of fun to live in if you were straight and white. More of a daily grind if you weren’t but that’s by design.
For anyone else, Conservative Land would be the ‘spark’ in their lives going out. It’d be the voice of Reason sputtering.
For us, it’s just another day in TrumpLand…
Conservative Land would NOT be a place that innovated anything because innovative people would have been dissuaded from going there. Conservatives figuring that THEIR gene pool would make up the difference are going to be mighty shocked when they discover that White People — fine as they are — aren’t an more innovative than anyone else. In a world though where few new ideas gain purchase (because thinking the SAME is encouraged), innovation fails to ignite.
Thinking the same promotes acting the same promotes being the same.
And yet — as it teetered toward ruin — because bankrupt, because horrible standard of living, because dwindling tax base — Conservative World would still THINK it was succeeding. What everyone else called failure, they’d call ‘doing things their way’. But, no — it’s failure. Total failure by EVERY other name.
Conservative World would probably attend the meet-up as spiffed up as it could be — but unable to hide how hard things have been. Holding out their hand to Progressive World — after the hand-shaking was done — probably gave the WHOLE GAME away: They needed help.
And they knew Progressive world 1) could help and 2) probably would help.
Progressive World would be a very different place — where anything can happen because so many people are creating so many things and thinking so many exciting new thoughts. Diversity challenges everyone to compete against everyone else on the levelest possible playing field.
Diversity of opinion and process, diversity of point of view, diversity of problem-solving. The human genome works by favoring strong attributes over weak ones — strong attributes being the ones where you’ll ‘survive better’ for having them. The irony (cause you can never have too much irony) is that White Supremacists are under the mistaken impression that they can ‘fine tune’ and ‘purify’ their white genes by excluding everything else from their gene pool.
One more dumb white person idea gets revealed for the dumb white person idea that it is. White Supremacists aren’t stupid. The aren’t incompetent. But they do cling on to bad information like it was their last dollar — which is stupid.
While Progressives could never, would never have a place in Conservative World, the opposite is almost never true. It’s not true now.
One of the most important aspects about Progressive World — what really sets it apart from Conservative World — is that it evolves. All the time. It allows people to evolve. To grow up and mature. To live and LEARN. And then to come back to the fold and contribute — hopefully having LEARNED from their mistakes.
There wouldn’t be a single attribute about Conservative World that wasn’t a thousand times better in Progressive World — Food, Entertainment, Art, Technology, Governance.
The only question remaining after this Thought Experiment — if it could be made real? What to do about the fence we’ve built around Conservative World. We’re not tearing it down — that’s for sure. Hell — the question I’m thinking of is — do we build it even higher? Or do we must mine the damn thing and enjoy the fireworks?
Hey, Trumpanistas — Still fuming over ObamaCare? Still cursing the day your insurer was FORCED to insure your pre-existing condition without bankrupting you? Still hating on having to pay for other peoples’ health care — including WOMEN?
Well TrumpCo has exactly what you’re looking for — a ‘health insurance’ plan that has the same grasp of what ‘insurance’ is as YOU apparently do — NONE! Introducing, New Trump-Care ‘PICK-AN-ORGAN’: The Health Care ‘Plan’ designed for Trumpanistas.
Think of it THIS WAY: You have lots of organs. What are the chances any will ‘go south’ on you during your lifetime? Your lungs? Probably not — unless you smoke. Your kidneys — You have two — you’re playing with house money. Your heart? Well, okay — that one could be a problem but if your heart’s going south on you — you’re pretty much toast anyway, right?
The point is, Trumpanistas, you’re too smart to INSURE organs you don’t need to — or are worth the risk NOT to insure. And that’s why you’ll love ‘TrumpCare PICK-AN-ORGAN’ —
LUNGS
Odds are nothing will happen to either of em. But you want to play it safe — so we offer options to allow YOU to decide: Insure Neither Lung, One Lung or Both Lungs!
See? Easy! Now, of course, the trick is, if you insure just one? Ya better hope like hell you insured the correct Lung — the one that’s gonna be needing insurance…
LET’S TALK INTESTINES!
If you’re like the average Joe, you have LOTS of this stuff inside ya. You have intestines to spare. In fact, you have so much intestine you even have two kinds (I know — weird, huh?) But do you really need to insure both? Do you really need to insure ‘ALL’ of it?
And what about your APPENDIX? You don’t even use it — hell you haven’t used it in millions of years. Only an idiot insures something he can’t use — amiright?
I KNOW THAT’S MY LIVER BUT WHAT THE HELL IS THAT ‘GREEN’ THING?
The Truth is — Outside of your heart and lungs, your stomach and your anus, you haven’t a clue how any of your plumbing works. You know you HAVE a Liver and you remember somebody lecturing you once about alcoholism while you were passed out in a drunken stupor but that was so long ago.
Be that as it may — This is probably you: “What in hell’s name is that green thing — and please don’t say I have one…!”
Yeah, you have one all right — and it costs a BOMB to insure it — IF you insure it…
YOUR SPLEEN — 1-2-3-ANSWER QUICKLY: ‘WHAT’S IT DO?‘
Not a goddamned clue, amiright (and “The spleen ‘spleens’ ain’t it”)?
Here – we’ll even show you a spleen and point out all its bits. Does THAT help? No?
And you want to insure this WHY?
AND THEN THERE’S THIS ORGAN…
Insuring brains is expensive. In fact, it’s SO expensive, you’d have to be crazy to pay the freight. So why bother.
TrumpCare ‘PICK-AN-ORGAN’: ‘Hey — look at all the money YOU just saved!’
I’ve asked this before but haven’t gotten an answer yet… I know what Progressives want to PROGRESS toward: as much equality as possible for as many people as soon as possible. Progressives want to progress in any we they can toward a level playing field where every American has the best possible chance to contribute as much as they possibly can to America while benefiting as much as they can.
Progressives want America to be as diverse as possible because they know that DIVERSITY is what makes America Exceptional.
Progressives want America to PROGRESS — just like it says in our name. We want America to PROGRESS into THE FUTURE.
Okay, conservatives, we showed you ours, now show us yours: What do Conservatives want to CONSERVE? And how will conserving THAT get us anywhere NEAR our FUTURE? To judge by republican policies and Trumpian attitudes, conservatives want to conserve the worst of America: Its racism, its misogyny. Its bigotry and willful ignorance.
Republicans want to conserve White Christian Male Culture.
Now, that’s easy for me to say — a progressive shithead but, for shits n giggles, I recommend finding a conservative friend — if you still have any — and ask them, point blank: “Dude — what is it exactly you’re trying to conserve anyway?” After they try to avoid answering, listen carefully. They won’t say anything logical or even intelligible. That’s the point.
Their simple answer is “How it WAS.” Meaning, ‘How it was when WHITE PEOPLE ruled the world’.
The real joke of it is, White People really do believe the World is ‘far better’ when their Wonder Bread tastes and judgments rule everything and diversity is held at bay. White People think they have a choice regarding the Future — and who ‘peoples’ it.
Shouldn’t someone tell them what happens to people in the MINORITY when the MAJORITY decides to treat them unfairly?
Donald Trump thinks every human transaction is a deal where someone wins and the other guy loses. He could not be more wrong. But then, he’s an Epic Narcissist — and he can ONLY see the world from his incredibly narrow, infantile perspective and FROM his incredibly narrow, infantile perspective, he needs to ‘win’ everything.
That means Donald Trump is ‘Transactional’. He sees no value in relationships other than as one more means to leverage someone. When a person no longer serves a purpose to Donald, they exit his sphere — having been booted from it, NDA in hand.
But, our friend Donald is learning — as we are — that the world is not transactional, it is almost entirely ‘RELATIONAL’. Relationships are the REAL currency human beings rely on. That is why Vladimir Putin has focused so much of his energy on disrupting America’s RELATIONSHIP with Europe. He sees NATO as his enemy — its Treaty of Mutual Protection as the ‘shield’ that keeps him from even daring to pull another ‘Crimea’ in Eastern Europe.
You cannot solve the Middle East by ‘cutting a deal’. The hurts go back not just generations but millennia. No amount of cash can assuage wounds of that nature. Truth is, only violence can — retribution and the feeding of old grudges. It’s one of the ugly Truths about humans; it’s why some conflicts are and will always be intractable. They will always be time bombs whose volatile, unstable fuses could go off any second.
Here in America, certain Americans are learning that same terrible lesson — that Life’s RELATIONAL and if you empower a man who thinks YOUR PAIN can be bought — your pain will remain while HE, strangely, gets richer.
Donald — apparently — thinks he can bamboozle Robert Mueller. God, I hope that’s true. It means Donald Trump thinks he can ‘Transactionalize’ Robert Mueller — cut a deal with him where (Trump being Trump) Donald Trump WINS and Robert Mueller LOSES. But then, Donald Trump (being transactional) is MISSING the fact that Robert Mueller has NEVER behaved that way and, in fact, has spent is PROFESSIONAL CAREER prosecuting people (like Donald) who did.
Robert Mueller is not impressed with power. He is impressed with The Rule of Law. That is the only ‘Transaction’ Robert Mueller comprehends. Whether Donald Trump speaks directly with Robert Mueller or not, this Shit Show is heading toward its climax.
With this morning’s tweet, Donald Trump demonstrated again his utter disregard for the Truth and for how this country actually functions. The goal is for as many people as possible to flourish and thrive as much as possible — which, in turn, makes even MORE people flourish and thrive.
Data says that’s how it actually works. Because the world is so RELATIONAL.
Donald Trump will never ‘learn’ this lesson. I hope like hell WE finally have…
Let’s define our terms first: The reason we’re in this damned mess is that the republican party (uncapitalized because undeserving), seeing a great demographic Black Hole and Extinction in its future, deliberately and knowingly conspired with RUSSIA to seize power from the American Electorate in a soft Coup D’Etat.
Election 2016 was Illegitimate probably from Top to Bottom.
When I say ‘republican party’, of course, what I mean is ‘WHITE, CHRISTIAN MALE CULTURE’ — a ‘culture’ built almost entirely ON BULLSHIT.
White, Christian Male Culture (WCMC) believes that White People are superior to all other people on the planet, that White People are smarter, better looking, better suited to succeed, better athletes, better everything. They believe White Music is better (ever hear a racist rail against jazz?). White Literature (hilarious cos White People don’t read). White Religion.
Especially White Religion. White Religion sits at the core of White Male Culture — the belief not that ‘god’ is White but that each and every White Person is ‘GOD’ themselves and therefore omnipotent. What they say goes.
Problem is, it doesn’t. Because when White People enter an environment that isn’t just ‘Other White People’, they bump into something that disconcerts the hell out of them: DIVERSITY. They find they have to COMPETE with people who haven’t had to compete practically EVER. At least not with people who weren’t White.
America is diverse and has always been diverse. DIVERSITY is what makes America ‘EXCEPTIONAL’. Diversity IS ‘American Exceptionalism’. All other countries evolved over long periods of time with scattered tribes slowly coalescing into a National Tribe with distinct National ‘characteristics’. The French ‘evolved’ into being French, the Germans into being Germans, the Swiss the Swiss, the English the English and so on. In the 1500’s, if you were to step into any of what became those countries, the national character we now think of as those countries was already well-formed enough to be reflected in the historical record.
And, then, all those DIFFERENT national characters started arriving in a ‘Neutral Environment’ — America (made a whole lot more ‘neutral’ via ‘Guns, Germs & Steel’ (to borrow the title of Jared Diamond’s excellent book). None of those peoples who arrived on these shores were ‘American’. They became American by being here — while their Culture met (perhaps for the first time) and mingled with other Cultures and began to ‘cross-breed’ with them.
The result of all that cross-breeding is us — America — and all the dynamism and actual Greatness that flows from us. We are The World mixed together. We’re the lab for what happens genius from one culture meshes with genius from another culture to produce genius from a third (our) culture.
And it works. God-damn, it WORKS!
That, apparently, gives WCMC a sad. It makes it feel scared. Threatened. Unqualified. It isn’t of course — WCMC is no better or worse than any other culture; it, too, has produced great things. It just has the wrong idea of itself — it thinks it’s better than everyone; good thing that’s fixable. Ask Germany.Cult
Donald Trump is the literal FACE of WCMC. It is White-White-White-WHITE. It is Christian — it does not believe a word of the faith it professes (having never read the actual texts their faith is based on) but claims to be among its most ardent followers. It is Male — oh boy, is it Male; nothing makes it happier than waving its dick in your face or, worse, sticking it in you against your will because IT feels ENTITLED to.
So, yeah — Donald Trump IS White, Christian Male ‘Culture’. If you voted for it? You WILL deserve everything that befalls you.
The Truth is — Outside of your heart and lungs, your stomach and your anus, you haven’t a clue how any of your plumbing works. You know you HAVE a Liver and you remember somebody lecturing you once about alcoholism while you were passed out in a drunken stupor but that was so long ago.
