Author Archives: oinsketta

Taking sides/cognitive dissonance

Humans are pulled by a need to do the right thing.  It is not always easy to know what the right thing to do is.  We will often be influenced by those around us, it feels good to agree with people we like.  We have seen over and over lately how strong the pull of loyalty to your perceived tribe is to most people.  That force can make otherwise sluggish citizens throw themselves into battle against police, grunting in unison as they crush a cop in a doorway in their attempt to break into a locked building. It makes you turn your back forever on somebody you were once close to.

I had a friend whose marriage was daily trial by combat.  It was that way from before the wedding and there was no let up in the decades of the marriage.  My friend told me that he was tortured by the damage he was doing to his young sons by raising them in a brutal war zone.  

I was raised in a brutal war zone, though the war was not mainly between my parents but against me, and my sister, so he didn’t need to explain about the damage.  The damage of witnessing violent anger in loved ones goes straight to the soul of an impressionable young person.  How are they to make sense of the world, have faith in the healing power of love, when their earliest memories are of explosions of rage from their caregivers and protecters?

As a young person you are sometimes fortunate to meet people in life who may offer you a helpful perspective.  Sometimes they make you laugh, affirm something important in yourself.  You can learn useful things from them, like when to remain silent, when to add your part.  You feel great affection for this kind of person, a relative or friend of the family who understands something about your life that your immediate family may often not seem to.  There’s no tension, as there often is within a nuclear family. We are lucky to run into these sympathetic souls.  

Then one day you learn that the funny person you recently laughed with has struck a deadly blow to the heart of your family.  Your parents’ love is too tied up with rage to accept, says this judgmental longtime family friend/relative.   “FUCK HIM!” snarl the parents in unison.  There is no greater feeling of unity than righteous anger at an external enemy.   

The strong feeling of unity lasts until the regular war resumes, a moment later.  A war that neither side has the slightest ability to resolve.  Whatever you want to say about the two combatants, they are not skilled in any kind of conflict resolution.  They only know how to fight to the death, no matter what.

If on Monday we had a relaxed friendly conversation at a party, on Friday you will get the memo: our old “friend” is a vicious, demanding, angry, judgmental, unforgiving, unapologetic, unloving, wrong, sick, irredeemable asshole.  He’s a Nazi, a fucking self-righteous Nazi, who needs to be right even if it involves mass murder.

You may take this assessment as tinged with hyperbole, but the point will be clear enough.  This person, not good.  This person, bad, dangerous.  Hurt your parents very deeply.

In the case of parents who lie to their children, the most pressing danger is the story on the other side of the lie coming to light.   That is the most dangerous story in the world, the shameful one they are determined to keep secret.  Look how the adorable, skillful fucking sadist feints and bobs as he works the conversation closer and closer to the “lie”, to his own self-righteous, pernicious version of “truth” because he is the only one who knows the “truth,” this sick, damaged, judgmental fuck with his fucked up lying loser life.

You now have two irreconcilable images of this person you always liked, pulling hard in opposite directions.  Cognitive dissonance is hard to sit with.  How can this funny, intelligent, sensitive person who always treated you well suddenly be such a colossal, irredeemable monster, the metaphorical killer of  your mom and dad?   He’s got to be one or the other, or some grotesque combination of both, or a great psychopath and actor, both. 

The natural fall back is loyalty to your clan, because, really, when the other choice is to be irked by the thought that no matter how bad, and wrong this person is, no matter how much your parents tell you how he tortured them, you have experienced a completely different, well-loved person for years.  

Oh, well.   At least you didn’t really have an independent friendship with the person, you saw them only at family gatherings.  That won’t happen any more.  Whew, that’s kind of a relief, no? 

Tropical Trump and Global fascist Bannon

Heather Cox Richardson, writing about yesterday’s Brazilian version of January 6, 2021 (accomplished after a consultation visit to Bolsonaro from Sloppy Steve Bannon) flagged this ‘social media’ post by the big orange polyp.

“‘Tropical Trump’ as he is affectionately called, has done a GREAT job for the wonderful people of Brazil,” Trump said on his social media outlet. “When I was President of the U.S., there was no other country leader who called me more than Jair.”

Jair, you recall, famously said he’d kill his son if he turned out to be a homosexual.  More ominously, he lamented the mistake of the military coup he took part in as a junior officer — their failure to murder another forty to fifty thousand members of the intelligentsia, labor and church leaders and so on.  If those dissident fucks were all dead, you’d have a wonderful dictatorship in Brazil.

Heather concludes, after a sampling of condemnations of the violence by US, UN and EU officials:

As of 11:00 tonight, neither House speaker Kevin McCarthy (R-CA) nor Senate minority leader Mitch McConnell (R-KY) had any comment on the events in Brazil. 

By Sunday night, Brazilian police had retaken control of the vandalized buildings and arrested 170 rioters.

https://open.substack.com/pub/heathercoxrichardson/p/january-8-2023?r=74gv9&utm_campaign=post&utm_medium=email

Look, McConnell and McCarthy can’t condemn this kind of murderous fascist riot without crossing a party line. They can’t acknowledge that the official Republican party position on the recent American assault on the Capitol — “legitimate political discourse” — is a steaming pile of dung.  They must act like it’s totally fine, if you lose an election and claim for months (with a $50,000,000 dark money ad campaign) that it was stolen, to express yourself with massive violence and organized lawlessness.  That’s all, according to the Republican National Committee, protected by the First Amendment, and the Second — and the Fifth!  

Anyone who sees daylight between the aims and methods of the MAGA party, the fanatical fans of Bolsonaro, and the good old brawling Nazi party is hallucinating. 

Excellent telling of Kevin McCarthy’s pathetic “victory”

Dana Milbank, with a thorough description of man of principle “Well, Kevin, I guess these people are more upset about the election than you are” McCarthy and his sacrifice of everything imaginable to end up as the Speaker of an ungovernable MAGA majority House. Ironic and grotesque, that the goal of the elected GOP House hardliners is disabling the United States government crippling the “administrative state” and the destruction of liberal democracy. Here’s Milbank:

The holdouts had been given essentially everything they had asked for — and still, the extremists demanded more. “A deal is NOT done,” Perry, head of the House Freedom Caucus, tweeted Thursday afternoon

“Somebody should check and make sure Kevin McCarthy still has two kidneys,” Adam Smith (Wash.), top Democrat on the Armed Services Committee, quipped Friday.

By Friday evening, the rebels could hardly believe the breadth of McCarthy’s capitulation. “We’re running out of things to ask for,” Gaetz marveled.

Yet still they tortured McCarthy. One vote shy at the end of Friday night’s 14th ballot, McCarthy publicly humiliated himself by walking over to Gaetz and pressuring him to switch his vote. In view of the whole House and the TV cameras, Gaetz rebuffed him. McCarthy retreated. “We’ll do it again,” he said angrily.

Finally, after four full days of chaos capped by intra-GOP fisticuffs and Republicans voting down their own motion to adjourn, McCarthy claimed the gavel. But by then his fate had become unimportant, because whoever occupies the speaker’s chair will now be irrelevant. McCarthy’s surrender has condemned the House to two years — or more — of anarchy.

https://wapo.st/3GR6pcI

“We’re running out of things to ask for,” said one of several insurrection-minded MAGA Representatives who had previously asked for an unconditional presidential pardon, from the man with absolute pardon power.

A small group of irrational fanatics publicly demanding absolute power, by any means necessary, what could possibly go wrong?

The insurrection continues

Let’s leave aside the question of how a brand new member of Congress gets away with tweeting the real time location of the Speaker the House as the Speaker is being secured from a mob calling for her death. If that’s not giving aid and comfort to an insurrection, I don’t know what the fuck is. Then she wins re-election by 500 or so votes. Then, along with a handful of other extremists, blocks all action in Congress for several days commemorating the original insurrection on its second anniversary. Only in America, baby.

But leave that aside, here are two pictures from the more than three hours the defeated President let his bonfire burn in the Capitol building.

If all of those hopped up idiots shown in the second picture had swarmed into the building, there would have been a massacre.

This 2:24 pm tweet, deleted by Elon Musk when he reinstated the Big Orange Turd to Twitter recently, certainly didn’t help.

As maddening as it is that none of the wealthy architects and funders of the violent riot to overthrow democracy, in the name of an enraged, racist asshole who lost the election, has been touched by the law so far, it is equally maddening to see insurrectionists in Congress, serving as obstructers of the People’s business without consequence for their treachery.

Get the indictments rolling, Jack Smith! Come on, Fani Willis. Keep going, Letitia James.

MAGA logic

On the surface “MAGA logic” is kind of an oxymoron, I know, but there is a brutal logic followed by the wealthy few who have funded and used first the John Birch Society, later the “Birthers”, the Tea Baggers, the Freedom Caucus, then MAGA itself. These pathologically greedy, entitled psychopaths knew exactly what they were doing, for their own self-interest, at every step.

So while it seems counterintuitive that the most extreme members of the MAGA “movement” are torturing and humiliating the pathetic and cowardly Kevin McCarthy, the one Trump told to go fuck himself when he called in terror from the Capitol on January 6th, it may not be. Remember McCarthy vigorously denounced Trump after January 6th, shortly before he went down to Florida to selflessly sample his leader’s crusty nether regions in order to get back into the good graces of someone at that time regarded as a traitor. An, at the time, powerful traitor, mind you.

So this shit show in the House of Representatives is bad for the country, it’s bad for democracy, it’s bad for the fucking MAGA brand itself (even though that brand is, frankly, destroy the government and democracy) but luckily for MAGA, the ends always justify the means and their base is up for anything as long as someone is hurt and humiliated by it. Ask newly minted statesman Mitch McConnell about that winning strategy, if you have any doubts…

Dead Man Walking

Sometimes the pain we experience can stop us dead in our tracks.  Feel a powerful enough jolt of pain and you may find yourself unable to move in any direction.  I know it happens to me, anyway.  Look across the gravestones and see people who once comforted you, strangers now, so intent on avoiding eye contact it can bore a hole in your heart as long as you still care, still cling to counterfactual hope. 

In a sense we are all dead people walking, and one day our walking becomes only sitting, then lying down, then less than that.  The dead can’t do anything about it and death is a final refuge from shame, anger, pettiness and every other terrible thing we must sometimes tolerate in life.  Death is a very high price to pay for that kind of relief.

I have to reschedule a cancer biopsy that was cancelled yesterday, can’t lift the phone.   Need to find a surgeon to replace my left knee, but I also need to buy additional insurance to supplement the generous Medicare that will pay 4/5 of the $80,000 operation.  I need to get the Medigap insurance ASAP, since it takes six months to become effective for treatment of a preexisting condition, like bone on bone osteoarthritis.  Meanwhile, paralyzed, as I continue the painful knee exercises.  The guy who is supposed to be making the Don Joy medial compartmented unloader brace hasn’t called me back and I haven’t been able to call him.

What I can do at the moment is sit and type.  Writing is an indispensable part of my day.  I do this now to try to move some of the awful feelings out of the way, to understand, and then compartmentalize, things that are otherwise unthinkable.  My hope is to make a few phone calls once I tap here a bit. 

My niece and nephew, irretrievably lost to me, because of their mother’s unspeakable humiliation at her untruthful husband’s shame.  Kool-aid was served up any time my name came up, it would appear, a more bitter flavor than any I know.  It has turned me into a monster and enemy to two kids I used to play with.  That this has been accomplished by lies is little consolation to me, after all, I know myself to be a truthful person of good character. 

Two of my longtime closest friends are now shambling zombies, avoiding eye contact with me in a graveyard.  I don’t blame them for feeling that way, actually.  If I had treated them the way they treated me, explicitly and undeniably for the last year and a half, I’d probably do anything I could to cover my shame.

What do we do with this kind of pain, these unwanted tastes of our own death, the death of loved ones, while we are alive and, theoretically, able to talk things out, apply love and understanding to fix things so tragically broken?   Tragedy is when a beautiful thing that should be able to be mended is instead destroyed, out of anger and humiliation.   The feeling’s now mutual, pal, you are dead to me.  Not very satisfying, really, but a necessary step in healing — the discarding of people who insist they love you while demanding that only their feelings matter.   They have very strong feelings about this, understand.   Strong as death itself, it turns out. 

I think this is meant to show Trump’s greatness, somehow

We live in an amazing world, where facts can be denied because millions prefer a nice “fuck you” to anything else.  I seriously think this video is supposed to prove, although the data shows that the US had by far the highest rates of Covid-19 death anywhere on earth (and fuck “data,” you know?), that only Trump can… make us the greatest country in the world again.

https://youtube.com/shorts/8EWpuls5wWI?feature=share