When America Jumped the Shark

“She was a sweet, pretty California girl with Palestinian roots who left an arranged marriage only to find love with a man who committed the worst mass shooting in U.S. history.”

So began the lead story on the Chicago Tribune’s website this Wednesday.  I realize many in the media have gone out of their way to try and personalize everything Muslim over the past fifteen years. But has it really come to this?

What’s next? How about: Eva Braun, a sweet, pretty girl from the Bavarian hills who left the bucolic but restrictive confines of her home only to find love with a man who committed perhaps the worst genocide in modern history.

We’ve officially gone crazy. Do I have to note that this “sweet, pretty girl with Palestinian roots” is a likely accomplice in the killing of 49 people? What has gone wrong with America? It seems we have no standards or decency, that gossip and personal innuendo have not just replaced the news but that reporting has become a parody of itself, where all stories are real and valid as long as you tell them with verve. We have become a nation of bullshit artists, in love with the sound of our own words, and an accessory to murder becomes a “sweet, pretty California girl” when it suits the larger narrative.   

This country used to be able to count on its reporters to seek the truth. Wise and strong leaders would guide us in times of trouble, men like Lincoln, like Ike, like FDR, compelling us to preserve the union, warning us against the powers of fascism or the military industrial complex. But I’ve come to think that whatever blessings God has shed on this country since its founding have been taken away, that this nation is now cursed by purveyors of lies and ineptitude.

It is time to hunker down, to take stock, to realize that the people who purport to inform and to lead us are not by and large working in our best interest. It is time to turn off our Facebook pages, to leave our chatrooms, to step back and take the time to be individuals again. It is time to think for ourselves.  

The End of the Republic

It may seem like an eon away, but just a year ago it was widely assumed that Jeb Bush would be the Republican nominee and take on Hillary Clinton in the general election to decide who would be the next President of the United States. Normally, those who choose which candidates get promoted into positions of political power in this country at least have the decency to change the label on the can of crap they are selling the American public. In the current election cycle, they didn’t even feel they needed to change the names on the cans, that the American voters had become so comatose and uninvolved we’d just get in line for the latest can of Bush, the new and improved Clinton. At the time, I thought it would effectively be the end of our Republic if the American people validated the choices of the donor class and made these two candidates their respective parties’ nominees, that the people’s right to choose would have been so abridged by the money men that democracy as practiced in this country would cease to have any real meaning.

Thankfully, the American people, or at least those in one of our two major political parties, rebelled. Of course, part of the reason was that one of the brands was particularly sour. Have you ever met anyone who thought the last President Bush did such a great job that we had to bring the Bushes back for one more round? Forget all the other contradictions of his Presidency, of campaigning against nation building and for a smaller government then executing the biggest expansion of the federal government and the American empire since the Johnson Administration. Just the decision to cajole us into waging the Iraq War alone should have been enough to forever stain the Bush name. Yet there we were, not even a decade later, being asked to vote for another Bush as President. The hubris of those bankrolling Jeb’s campaign was astounding. Fortunately, other than Mitt Romney and a couple of other wealthy sycophants, no one was frightened away by all the Jeb campaign cash. Even more fortunate, Jeb! was a half-hearted, petulant candidate whose only early sign of passion was a soliloquy about how being an illegal immigrant was an act of love. Now whether any of the elves and dwarves in the Republican field would have been capable of exposing Jeb’s vulnerabilities is an open question. Which is why I credit Donald Trump with the saving of our democracy.

I should state right here that I’ve always disliked the Trump brand, and I remain unconvinced that he is some kind of a political wunderkind, or for that matter that he would make a decent President. But there is one thing that should be clear by now: Donald Trump knows how to destroy a person’s reputation.

However, I don’t think Donald Trump will survive the conflagration he has ignited. To me, Trump is Robespierre. At some point, the same forces he has unleashed will turn on him, and he will be consumed. Now whether this happens before or after the general election in November, I can’t say. But I would be very surprised if a Trump Administration made it past a first term. For that matter, I think the same thing about Hillary Clinton.

For a long time, most Americans have not trusted the institutions of political, cultural, and economic power. But we pretty much kept quiet as the machineries of power kept rolling along, seemingly oblivious to how much we had grown to despise them. Now, like Prospero, Donald Trump has come along and spoken the words that dare not be said. The important words being not so much “build the wall,” although that is what got things started, as “the system is totally corrupt” and “our leaders must go.” 

As much as they try to isolate and castigate their opponents, I doubt the established purveyors of public policy and opinion will be able to get this genie back in its bottle. The storm has begun. And I, for one, hope it will not end until the authorities have all been routed. In fact, I don’t just want them gone. I want them to suffer, like they’ve made the American people suffer for the past 20 years.   

I, Loudmouth

I stopped writing this blog a couple of years ago. There has been this growing dislike within the zeitgeist for the internet troll, against the flameout that disrupts civil discussion. It gave me pause. I became increasingly uncomfortable at the prospect of being labeled as one of “those guys.” This blog also didn’t seem to go with all the other things I was doing. Would being the Asshole of the Century stop me from getting my poetry published? Would it cause a potential employer to balk at offering me a job? I felt the pressure to tone it down, to become civil.

So I shut up. But no more.

My return to this blog was probably first predicated by my decision to leave Facebook, with its little tribes of like-minded folks shunning those they find disagreeable. It no longer feels right to have the parameters of my outbursts dictated by the consensus of a community of my supposed friends. We’ve reached the point where the fate of the world is too important to step aside and let it be decided by the folks already drinking the Kool-Aid.

Disruption has become not just an act of personal defiance. It is a civic duty. We are in the process of becoming Rome, where a ruling class placates the masses with a program of bread and circuses that serve to distract us from the fact we have almost no say in the future of our country, our planet, our families, or our posterity. In this context, it is imperative to speak my peace without concern for whom I might offend.    

Democracy is on the precipice, with a handful of billionaires having an outsized influence on the body politic, and a self-appointed meritocracy works against the interests of most of the American people. The school system emasculates our children, spending most of its energy training them to be a cross between a trained monkey and a computer, programmed to conform while efficiently completing a mundane series of tasks. Culture has increasingly turned into entertainment, tinged with a dose of brainwashing, as our world revolves around our smartphones and a well-crafted fiction that is accepted as given. There is very little impetus to rock the boat, the goal of the enlightened class being the process of learning from other enlightened people what enlightened people should think. Conformity is enforced even as the culture tears itself apart, as opposing sides seek their own consensus. In such a world, thinking for yourself is not just a revolutionary act but a public gift, albeit one not likely to be appreciated by others.   

Even most of today’s music, the creative art I believed held the secret to the human heart, increasingly means nothing. Listening to the radio feels like it is 1974 all over again. The production studio is once again the locus of creativity, and the songs, to the degree they are about anything at all, run the long but narrow gamut from loud declarations by the latest cock-of-the-walk to bathetic moans of personal lament. The difference being that the nadir of the 1970’s was a fairly narrow moment in time, whereas the current sonic purgatory shows no signs of abating.  

So The Asshole of the Century writes again. I will be holding court on a range of subjects in the coming weeks, from politics to culture, education to race relations.

I’m a loudmouth, baby. Try and shut me up.