End of the Experiment

Once again the greatest representative democracy the world has ever known finds itself in a maelstrom of confusion and insanity.  Thanks to the shamefully stupid Tea Buggers and their lethal demagoguery, the whole entire US government is shut down, brought to its knees, spinning its wheels while nearly a million federal workers are idle, national parks and recreation areas are closed, and numerous programs that provide real help to real people are shut down.  Welcome to the end of an experiment.

Our system of government has always been a social experiment on the grandest of scales.  Imagine a form of government born of the ideas of freedom, liberty and equality for all.  Something quite like that had never really been seen on this planet prior to the 18th century.  Thousands of years ago when primitive humans were first starting to gather together and form settlements, one of the first governments to evolve was a monarchy, a "king" to rule the others.  This ran through a couple of permutations, such as an oligarchy (rule by a small, chosen group of people) or plutocracy (rule by the wealthy) or theocracy (rule by religious leaders) but by and far it proved a fairly workable way to keep a bunch of farmers and shepherds kind of toeing some sort of line.

For a long time monarchies worked well, and still do in a number of countries in the present day, but as large number of people became more educated through technological advances such as the printing press, they soon outgrew the confines of royalty and royal lineage.  As the world expanded, wealth (and resultant power) became more distributed, government likewise expanded and adapted.  People were demanding more of a say in how their lives were run, and various forms of representation were created.  General assemblies, or bodies of citizens representing other citizens, began to take root in Europe, one of the earliest being Iceland's Althing, created in the year 976.  Eventually hybrid systems of government were created, merging kings with prime ministers and parliaments and a new form of representational government took hold.

The US government was born at the confluence of a number of serendipitous forces.  Initially formed by those fleeing religious persecution, it was a brand new world, full beyond measure of immense natural riches, free from the limited land mass and resources of Europe and the stifling weight of history and their stodgy traditions.  America was a clean slate, a chance to start anew, to get it right, to create the most perfect form of government that humans could possibly dream up. And dream they did.

The Constitution that came out of the late 1700s has become the gold standard of good government.  Not perfect, but better than anything else that has been around.  Even though it has been amended 27 times (with a 28th amendment proposed - one that would make all laws applicable to everyone), these adjustments have allowed the government to change in response to a rapidly changing world.  Some of them have been foolhardy (No. 18 - Prohibition) but others have been true to the finest expressions of the best of humanity (No. 13 - Abolition of Slavery and No. 19 - Women's Suffrage).  The great social experiment that is the United States of America was in full bloom, and doing very well indeed.

Scientists will tell you that the best experiments are those which are conducted in a closed system; that is, an environment where everything is carefully controlled and random outside forces kept to a minimum.  Even under the best of circumstances, a running experiment will start to degrade as entropy creeps in and wear and tear causes deterioration.  Our government has been beset with destabilizing forces from inside and out, from those which occur in nature to those created by our own shadow natures.

It seems the worst forces that befall our nation and disrupt our constitutional government are those created by ourselves.  In the past century, two devastating world wars, a number of smaller but still very significant skirmishes (Korea, Vietnam, Iraq) have caused great stress.  The threat of nuclear annihilation or environmental catastrophe has been shaping policy through most of this century.  But most insidious, it seems, are the forces of greed and religion.  They form a double-headed serpent, and it is at the nexus of those two where the most damage is done.

The past two decades have seen the ascendency of greed and religion in our government at a level that can scarcely be comprehended.  Like some kind of virulent zombie virus, it has taken over vast segments of the population and most of Congress, turning them into blathering idiots, and malignant ne'er-do-wells.  Complicated by a Supreme Court that has some of the most backward-thinking, regressive conservatives around, the complete corruption of our government by money has been aided and abetted by heinous, abominable rulings such as Citizens' United, which virtually assured the democratic system will be irretrievably choked and debased by an enormous influx of special-interest monies and corporate meddling.

Religion, and in particular Christian fundamentalism, has also insinuated itself into our legislative system at all levels.  Like a many-headed Hydra, it manifests itself in an appallingly large number of ways, from advocating to pharmacists to refuse to dispense birth control because it violates their "freedom of religious expression", to taking over school boards and forcing changes to their curricula to include bogus, intellectually untenable pseudo-sciences such as "intelligent design", to doing everything they can to prevent certain segments of the population from exercising their right to vote.  Using their religious beliefs like a shield, they cowardly pass preposterous laws designed solely to prevent women from exerting control over their reproductive destinies by forcing them to undergo unnecessary medical procedures such as ultrasounds, and enacting biased, draconian regulations that make it nearly impossible for planned-parenting agencies to legitimately and lawfully provide needed and wanted services.

We have seen the wealth of this nation being concentrated into the top 1% of the population, while everyone else considers themselves lucky if they just tread economic water.  This has caused this wealthy segment to tighten and consolidate their control over the Republican party, which is essentially working for the Koch brothers and the Dick Cheneys of the world.  Wars are started under the flimsiest of pretenses, bolstered by blatant lying and disinformation, and private corporations rake in the profits.

Sure, there are many evil people in this country who will gladly take this nation down a pathway to complete destruction if it meant getting their political agenda in place. All this is ultimately made possible by an uneducated, disinterested electorate, for whom critical thinking and skepticism are unknown concepts.  Too many people are more than willing to let Fox News or Glenn Beck or Rush Limbaugh or dozens of other conservative blowhards tell them exactly what to think and do.  They find it much easier to hate people who are different from them, and they make these "other people" convenient, easy scapegoats for the awful things their legislators - who they themselves had voted into office - do to the quality of their life and the complete ruination of the future of their children.  They just don't give a crap, and are too stupid to care.

The drama going on in this country now - the government being held hostage by a gang of 30 or 40 zealots, blinded by their own radical ideology to the damage they're doing - and the upcoming threat of a debt ceiling crises - which nearly all knowledgeable economists in this country agree would be a complete and unmitigated disaster on a global scale - is unprecedented, certainly in my lifetime.  I have never seen the country so thoroughly polarized, even back in the worst days of the Vietnam war, when our society was nearly ripped apart by a costly, tragic war which we eventually lost.  These Tea Baggers don't care how much damage and hardship they inflict on millions of people, or the millions and millions of dollars that will be shamefully squandered by a completely unnecessary government shutdown.  The only thing they care about is getting their own way, and they don't care how many lives are wrecked in the process.

Sadly, I'm beginning to think the great social experiment in representative democracy that is the United States of America is starting to wind down, to sag and break apart under the weight of its own misdoings and corruption. Our system of government is being poisoned by right-wing ideologues and religious zealots, who are pulling everyone down into their toxic cesspool of psychotic paranoia and dissolution.  I don't see a way out for America to save itself.  We may come out the other end of this somewhat intact, but we will be so changed that we will no longer be the America we once were.

Words Of Our Lives

Apparently words have expiration dates on their usefulness or popularity.  An august journalistic body known as the Associated Press came out with some changes to their style guide, which a lot of other journalists and even normal people use as a reference for spelling, grammar, etc.

It seems they have decided to drop the words "Islamophobia" and "homophobia" from their roster of Mighty Fine Words.  The reason that they gave was that the "-phobia" suffix was too close of a reference to a psychological disorder and they don't want people to think the words have anything to do with mental illness.

I've always felt homophobia is a mental illness anyway, so I don't understand what the issue is.  It really irritates the life out of me that people discriminate against gay people only because of their choice of who they love.

Gay marriage is not a threat to any form of traditional "heterosexual" marriage.  I'll tell you what are threats to traditional marriage:

Stupid people who have no business getting married and spend the rest of their time fighting each other are a threat to traditional marriage.

Idiots who get married and divorced multiple times like they are changing socks or something are a threat to traditional marriage.

Serial baby-makers with minimal or non-existent parenting skills who bring way too many innocent children into their crazy dysfunctional world to abuse, neglect and abandon, thus ensuring the next couple of generations will be equally as screwed-up, are a threat to traditional marriage.

Disgusting pigs who cheat on their spouses at the drop of a hat are a threat to traditional marriage. The 50% divorce rate bears this out.  Compared to them, the lesbian couple down the street who have lived together for 30 years is not a threat.

Some people are against gay marriage because of their religious beliefs.  To them, I say keep your religious beliefs to yourself.  Anyone is entitled to believe in whatever god-delusion seems to complement their personal agenda, but what one is NOT entitled to do is inflict their beliefs on their fellow citizens.  Believing in something doesn't make it true, and it doesn't give you the right to dictate to other people what they have to believe.

Fundamentalist Christians would scream like stuck pigs if someone tried to pass a law making them believe in Buddha or the Easter Bunny.  Idiotic brain-dead Tea Baggers howl that Sharia law is being imposed in various parts of the United States.  They would pronounce it an abomination if someone tried to force the teachings of the Qur'an on them, but think it's perfectly okay to force the teachings of the bible on their neighbors.  So much for their "love thy neighbor" crap.

Fundies also like to assert that their bible is the literal word of their god and it contains specific prohibitions against homosexuality.  The book of Leviticus is most frequently cited in this case.  Leviticus also contains a lot of other preposterous nonsense about shellfish and wearing certain fabrics, but the fundies pay no attention to that.  This cherry-picking of what you are (or are not) going to believe from the bible shows the worst kind of selfish intellectual cowardice there is.  Either you believe in the bible completely, 100 percent, or you don't believe it at all.  There is no middle ground with religious faith, especially when you're trying to ram it down other people's throats.

Since I'm just as qualified as anyone else, I'd like to throw out a couple of popular words and phrases which have outlived their usefulness and relevance, assuming they had any to begin with.  So, these are things which shan't be said any longer, thank you very much:

"YOLO" - or "You Only Live Once," a cryptic tag line which is used to justify any manner of unacceptable or obnoxious behavior, under the premise that life is short and we should be allowed to try anything once.  Basically a free pass for stupid behavior that doesn't involve death or widespread destruction, YOLO takes its place next to the execrable "It is what it is," a vile little Mobius-strip of circular anti-logic which is the linguistic equivalent of throwing your hands up in the air and passively surrendering to the idiot gods which rule this life.

"Double down" - or actually, lying again.  This came into prominence during the last presidential election when a Republican made a completely absurd, blatantly untrue statement, and when called on it, merely repeated the same bullshit more emphatically.  It is a consequence of Republican supporters who freely and willingly release themselves from the confines of logical argument - which has been used successfully for thousands of years since the ancient Greeks - and instead embrace the stupidest lies and fabrications imaginable because they sound good to them or at least, on the surface, appear to agree with their agenda.  Repeated endlessly on faux-journalistic crapfests like Fox News or by repulsive mountains of sweaty flab like Rush Limbaugh, Republicans and Tea Baggers discard facts as if they were articles of clothing soiled in a septic tank explosion, and will gleefully endorse any kind of ridiculous claptrap as long as it seems to reinforce their personal prejudices.  As someone once said, "You are entitled to your own opinions, but not entitled to your own facts."

"Fiscal cliff" - Hopefully this is something we won't have to hear about after December 31st of this year.  Completely fabricated, man-made and unencumbered by any form of reality, it is not really a "cliff" but rather a slope or slide.  Come January 1st, 2013, the entire country is not going to plunged into a dark, fearsome recession.  The banking system won't collapse and the internet won't go belly-up.  With no action from our wonderful leaders, taxes will go up and everyone will start screaming poverty, especially the so-called "job creators" (who, by the way, have been really incompetent in creating jobs over the last two years), but the cliff is really a stepping-stone to the next Armageddon-du-jour in modern American life, the debt-ceiling negotiations upcoming in February.   That will be another round of batshit-crazy political posturing and self-flagellation which serves no useful purpose other than to deceive the low-information majority of American citizens into believing that Congress is actually doing something valuable to justify their existence.  Which is the biggest scam of all.

And no, I'm not getting rid of the term, "batshit-crazy."  I still love using it and it's so very appropriate for almost any occasion.

Down To The Wire

Midterm elections are four days away and I'm going to be doing my election-worker thing on Tuesday, so I won't have to hear about voter projections and exit polls and states turning blue and red until late in the evening. From every indication, it's going to be an election like none other, as a tsunami-sized wave of stupidity and ignorance threatens to wash over this nation coast to coast as a plague of locusts, I mean Tea Partiers, comes home to roost.

Like an enormous flock of really stupid buzzards, the Tea Party candidates are circling in the sky right now, just waiting to swoop down on the decomposing remains of the dignity of this country. This has been an amazing election for a number of reasons, one of the worst being the enormous amount of money that has been poured into it over the last couple of weeks. They said on TV that more money has been spent on political advertising in the past two weeks as has been spent in the previous nine months. All thanks to those monolithic dipshits on the Supreme Court, who last January opened the floodgates by ruling that corporate interests can express their political opinions just like a regular flesh-and-blood person. And they "express" themselves with their deep pockets and funnel their money through a myriad of political action organizations with innocuous-sounding names.

Stretching the First Amendment until it's nearly unrecognizable, the "Justices" (term used loosely) did exactly the very worst thing it could. The election process in this country was already corrupted and debased by enormous amounts of money, and the Court ruling only allowed more money to be injected into a very sick, very broken system. It's like trying to put out a raging fire by pouring a bucket of gasoline on it. Now, right-wing crackpot groups in New York or Florida can buy airtime and drop their noxious opinions on Congressional races in Arizona and California. How is it even possible that single-issue social-conservative groups on the other side of the country know what is best for people in Arizona? In fact, they don't know what is best for us, nor do they care. The only thing they care about is to get the candidate they favor into office, who will presumably do their bidding and advance their twisted agenda. You might think it's the responsibility of the voter to weed through this weird blizzard of attack ads and ferret out the truth, but very few people care enough to do that.

The current crop of candidates include some of the most backward, reactionary and just plain deadheaded dimwits that I can ever recall. It seems the more idiotic, ridiculous and simple-minded the candidate, the more popular they are. Sharron Angle, running for Senate from Nevada, is a bottomless pit of stupidity, saying some of the most outrageous and jaw-dropping nonsense ever heard, and still she is in the race. In any other election, someone who had said such completely ridiculous things would have been laughed off the ticket, but not this time. There is another trend among these candidates to only talk to who they want to talk to, which is usually the cesspools over at Fox News, because they know they will be handled with kid gloves, portrayed in an extremely favorable light, and not asked any hard, embarrassing questions. Just the other day some journalists tried to corner Sharron Angle to have her answer some questions and she took off running on her stubby little tree-trunk legs like she was being chased by a murderer with a chain saw.

We see that here in the state of Arizona as the poorly-embalmed, grossly incompetent Jan Brewer refused to have any more debates with other gubernatorial candidates because the first debate made her look like a complete, total idiot. Which she surely is. But her habit of just not talking to anyone asking legitimate questions and trying to get some information out of her for the benefit of the voters is bad enough, but the fact that the voters let her get away with it is the most disturbing aspect of all. How very sad for the future of this country that the voters are so ignorant and disengaged that they just don't care anymore when candidates basically spit in their faces and say, "eat crap, I'm not telling you anything because I don't have to."

We haven't heard much from the Delaware Dimwit, Christine O'Donnell, because she's thankfully sinking fast in the polls and will hopefully just be a weird footnote when this is all over. Even the eternally annoying Sarah Palin hasn't opened up her big mouth in support of the Anti-Masturbation Princess in weeks. But there is a big surplus of creeps, like Joe Miller in Alaska and Ken Buck in Colorado and Nazi cross-dresser Rick Iott in Ohio and the F-5 tornado of weirdness Rand Paul and going-to-pop-an-artery-any-second Carl Paladino, candidate of governor of New York, to name a very few, who are more than ready and willing to drag down this country in a maelstrom of idiocy and backward, regressive thinking.

Who is to blame for this very sorry state of affairs in which we find ourselves? There is plenty of blame to go around, first to the Democrats who have an astounding talent to pull defeat from the jaws of victory and absolutely screw up everything they touch. They have shown a startling lack of backbone in everything they do, and are so afraid offending anyone they end up offending everyone. President Obama gets some blame, too, for being too decent and intelligent a person, and making the great tactical error of thinking he could get the Republicans to cooperate and come together with the Democrats to try to solve some of the enormous problems that face this country. A huge segment of the Republican Party has never ever accepted a black President and barely bother to conceal their racism and bigotry anymore. A lot of them think the President is a Muslim. How can we possibly combat ignorance and stupidity of this magnitude?

But in my opinion most of the blame has to go to the American public, who somehow think the way to solve the problems of this nation are to elect the most ignorant, unqualified and stupid people that can be found. Somehow they have come to the conclusion that dumber is better, and the best thing to do is to take everyone back to the 1950s, when everyone knew their role and their place and everything was better. Back then, there was no Al Qaeda, no bin Laden, no September 11th, no AIDS, no nuclear proliferation, no global warming (although a lot of people think that is a farce), no economic collapse, no multi-billion dollar bailouts. It shows ever so clearly the intellectual cowardice of the American population, and how they prefer to do the ostrich-head-in-the-sand approach to fixing everything. I dread next Tuesday, but at the same time I wish it was already over. If it looks really ugly now, that's probably nothing compared to what it will look like on Wednesday morning.