October 16, 2013

The Parable of the Bullshit and the Fan

Over the next day or few days, it is going to be dangerously yet gloriously entertaining to watch as the self-delusional rhetoric of the Tea Partiers hits the hard spinning blades on the fan of reality when the country either goes over into the abyss or they are forced to cower away from their threats by their own splintering party. They have for so long fed their belief that any crazy, made-up nonsense that pops into their blinkered minds exists as truth as long as it supports the internal narrative of their cult. One of them utters some BS. Then they all repeat the BS. Then it becomes a thing in itself, and in doing so is magically transformed into reality, an alternate reality that gathers gravitas in their echo chambers and then sounds an audience looking for anything to dump into their bucket of displaced white anger.

Kenyan and Marxist and Muslim and vaginal ultrasound and climate change hoax and death panels and the black guy shut down the government and kept our veterans out of their own memorials (not us because we're all in agreement here that we're inflicting this upon ourselves for a mutual pact of hate for that guy we all agree is the antichrist). They aren't just now taking America hostage with shutdown and default. They have held us hostage for years with their delusions. Their madness. Adolescent Salem girls seeing witchery in every fantasized turn. The Tea Party has been speaking in tongues otherwise known as gibberish as a matter of conduct for years. One, because it supports the totalism of and membership in their cult -- it is an act of purification. The real believers will commit to anything. And two, precisely because it is nonsense and nonsense creates a wall of noise known as obstruction.

But now, the ultimate shit-storm lie that shutdown and default will have little if any effect and will really be a big dose of good (even though it is really Obama who is causing this), is about to hit those rotors of reality. The Republican polls have already fallen. The markets will be next. And then, their pants will fall, and the would-be emperors will be caught standing naked in the Capitol while still complimenting each other on the fine cut of their inseams, wondering why America has finally realized the enemy within and sent them and their Republican brand into long and deserved exile.

Because now we know. They said they set out with one mission. To destroy Obama. But all along, they were attacking us, all of us. And their BS is finally, penultimately, gratefully about to hit the fan.

October 10, 2013

The Battle for Who We Are

We've reached a point in the Republicans' otherwise pointless act of shutting down the American government that the question must be asked whether a failed democracy isn't precisely the endgame that they are seeking. The criteria for ending their reckless game continues to shift but the horizon remains the same known catastrophe, economic ruin. Many seem nearly giddy with the prospect. Let's roll! They’ve cried as if facing an imaginary enemy from the dim margins of the mirror. The question is why?

Many have attributed it to a simple question of race as if their tantrum is the still echoing Rebel yell from the Southern secession of 1861. But to listen to the rhetoric of these so-called Constitutionalists, Originalists, the Tea Partiers, the evangelical theocrats, Palin, Cruz, Hannity, Beck, is to hear something a bit more nuanced and circumspect repeated again and again and again. It is an alternate narrative of America’s founding, a mythological account of the founders, the framers, not from the Civil War but from the Revolutionary War. The name “Tea Party Patriots” was not coined by accident. It emerges from this myth and propels their actions, giving them purpose because they believe it contains the true intent of America’s founding.

This is a battle between two competing narratives of America’s founding, and therefore between two competing narratives of what it means to be American.

In the far Right narrative, there is a deep reverence not with democratic principles, not really with the Constitution, but with the construct of the founders being white male property owners, that is, European and above all Christian, white, male, property owners. America's democratic principles from this view are secondary products of the virtue and standing of these men, her principles merely becoming rhetoric reconstructed in support of such veneration. Liberty is reconfigured, not as an inalienable right, a philosophical precept conferred on all humans, but as a birthright granted by God the Father, the ultimate white, male, property owner and self-made Übermensch. It is foremost a story of virtue and personality with freedom, liberty, and prosperity emanating from, products of, that will and compact with God.

A secular nation misaligned from the priesthood of the white, male, property owner founders breaks that compact with God and is lost. Turn on an evangelical television sermon, and you will hear this explicitly stated and stated with patriotic conviction. All of these things are entwined in their narrative, a narrative that sets itself as a counter to the secular reading of America’s founding. Review the Preamble to the Constitution:

We the People of the United States, in Order to form a more perfect Union, establish Justice, insure domestic Tranquility, provide for the common defence, promote the general Welfare, and secure the Blessings of Liberty to ourselves and our Posterity, do ordain and establish this Constitution for the United States of America.

Even though the extremist Right often claims provenance through the Constitution, this is really a revisionist view that is only maintained through the eyes of their narrative. The Constitution is a compact with all the People granted in order to form a more perfect (that is, inclusive) Union which includes the equalizing principle of Justice, insuring domestic Tranquility, promoting the general Welfare, and securing the Blessings of Liberty to ourselves and our Posterity (investing in the potential and future of its people). Outside of providing for a common defence [sic], all of these founding principles can be construed as being in conflict with the idea of white, male, property owners being inspired by God to become the template of American liberty. For as these believers constantly assert, why should the masses seeking justice, communities seeking tranquility, or the promotion of the general Welfare be a parasite upon the continued prosperity of those who already have those things through God’s grace and their own sweat? Why should they be concerned with your posterity? We are not in this Union together. Earn it for yourselves! There's nothing more Christian and more American than kicking 700,000 off of food stamps.

Their revisionist scaffold is set so firmly in place that it is possible to break it down into parts to tease out its influence upon their thinking. White. Male. Property owners.

White: African-Americans, Latinos, Native Americans, and other minorities do not have the sense of independence instilled in them. They do not have a work ethic. They are dependent upon handouts and the product of others. Government itself has become prescriptive of this dependency, catering to the dependents as a way to favor their votes. That in turn becomes an iterative cycle of government programs draining away the resources of the producers, creating more dependents and more democratized voters to reinforce the socialized system. As such, minorities must be taught, and being taught means they must have the proper sense of deference to their teachers. The issue of racism can be camouflaged by calling it deference to the narrative of their teachers (in which the slur of genetic or generational racial dependency is proclaimed in contrast to the vision of the white, male, property owning founders.) You, person of color, may be admitted only to the extent that you embrace this polarization with reverential fanaticism, and then only within the margins of rank.

Male: Defined within the context of the father model, the wise, bread-winning, loving through boundaries and punishment, heterosexual baby maker. Anything that encroaches upon this role, the empowerment of women and control of their own reproduction, the embrace of gays as equals, anything deemed not authoritarian and strict -- perceived feminine qualities of empathy, nurturing, understanding (which root in feminine, suckling government programs) -- is a threat, an antagonist to the male role as rightful leader.

Property Owners: A matrix that projects itself onto the person of wealth, the business owner, and by osmosis to corporate empires and the global plutocracy because America is but a product of their risk-taking, their work, their self-created legacy. Everyone else are dependents upon the product of their phallic thrust and should be sufficiently prostate or cut off from their parasitic draining of resources. The translation is that the lionization of the "Property Owner" has become the ideal of the plutocracy in which the heart of American individualism becomes inculcated with corporate hegemony. Of course, that sense of corporate rule, corporations and wealth having more virtue, more rights, more power in the course of the nation's business than its individual citizens stands in direct opposition to democracy, of equal rights and value for all the nation's citizens, even those who are deemed unworthy by the power structure. Add to this that corporations are by and large multinational entities who are not beholden to any nation's interests, people, or principles but only to the corporate bottom line and you have a recipe for direct subversion of democracy, nation by nation, government by government.

This shutdown fight, then, is more fundamental than competing parties and factions. The fight against government is the result of two competing founding narratives. The narrative of God-inspired, white, male, property owners bestowing the nation's prosperity has set itself against the secular narrative of We the People.

The problem, however, for the former narrative is that there is no prescription for the inevitable and continuing contraction of their white, male, property owning radius. There is no antidote to the creeping multiculturalism that threatens them. They resort to rigging the outcomes, but border patrols and gerrymandering and voter ID laws can only go so far. It is as if they are using an earthen dam to contain breaching floodwaters. It cannot hold against increasing minority populations, voter registrations, and upward mobility.

It is this foreboding sense of being overcome that is behind the anarchy, the take-down, the shutdown, the court jester mockery in the midst of the castle siege. They have become sheepish clowns, fools spouting the absurd, chasing phantoms, birthers demanding vaginal ultrasounds, climate change deniers espousing the science of creationism, pro-lifers proliferating assault rifles -- and finally, self-professed patriots launching attacks upon their own nation, bringing it to its knees before their last grasping claim of authority. And their constituents send them into the halls of Congress to do exactly that -- inflict clownish chaos as some sort of unstated protest and punishment for their own perceived displacement by other voices. It isn't so much that they comprehend the lunatic gibberish that spills from Michele Bachmann's mouth, but she is sticking it to "them" by their last weapon left, nonsense (for nonsense obstructs).

Now as they see their holy promise fail by urban encroachment and undone borders, their fall from grace is both sad and graceless. Their pulpits proclaim that America has fallen away from God for this is the only logical outcome that fits their crumbling narrative. They fear that the democratized People of other colors and cultures do not comprehend the true narrative and have come not only to invade their neighborhoods but to take their rightful rule of the Promised Land from them. It cuts the very idea of Americanism from them.

This is the battle hymn of the republic that sings so foully in the damning of Obama with 'truly not understanding what it is to be American,' the suspect Muslim, communist, terrorist. He is not born of their narrative and so can only be dismissed as a false prophet undeserving of respect, a liar, a con.

Neither he nor the hordes that he commands to take back America are to be trusted with the sacred narrative. They will be that America's end through entitlement, by race and gender. These ‘others’ read that blasted preamble with eyes on the prize. Posterity and general welfare be damned, all the undeserving People, all those masses do not deserve health care or domestic tranquility or...or justice...or general welfare for the dam will be breached and the God-inspired, white, male, property owner narrative will be drowned!

And this is where the patriot-traitors find themselves. Making their last stand. They will not surrender the narrative. They cannot. It is essential to their identity. That which they cannot contain, they intend to burn down around them for the honor of their perceived truth and the destruction of their foe. Such irony that they have no faith in America.

But here’s the thing. If their American narrative is so flimsy that it can be toppled by a black man becoming president or by a bill making it possible for Americans to get health care coverage or by new immigrants entering the country, then their narrative was never true to begin with. It was a ruse of their own telling because ALL of those things are part of an inevitable course of democracy that cannot be stopped or braked without our system becoming something else, some other form of rule of categorical suppression. It is that dark governance that they now court, whose wind-whistling ledge they edge ever nearer to skittering.

And therein lies the lie, their lie to themselves that only they know what it is to be a true American - because they are anything but.

July 14, 2013

Stand Your Ground With Trayvon -- Tourism Boycott of Florida

The only thing that will compel Florida to rid themselves of their murderous, racist Stand Your Ground law, is a tourism boycott. That includes Disneyworld, their beaches, and their theme parks. It is their economy. The threat of economic boycotts have led Southern States to remove Confederate emblems from their state flags. You want to effect change in Florida, boycott their tourism, stick with it, and stand your ground.